The full error for anyone having issues with the screenshot is: Installation Failed Bootloader installation error The bootloader could not be installed. The installationc ommand <pre>grub2-install -target=i386-pc -recheck -force /dev/nvme0n1</pre> returned error code 1.

Context: I’ve had a hell of a rough time trying to install linux on my system, I’ve tried Pop, 2 versions of Ubuntu, Mint, and now I’m trying Nobara, and it’s the first one that failed to install (I’ve mostly had video driver issues with the others.) My current disk situation is kind of a mess, I have 4 in the system:

  1. ~15 year old OCZ SATA 128GB SSD (windows/boot)
  2. ~10 year old WD SATA 512GB SSD (windows libraries like pictures, documents, downloads, etc)
  3. ~6 month old Samsung 990 EVO 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD (games installed from windows)
  4. ~5 year old BPXPro 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD (previous Ubuntu install that I had other issues with)

#1 is my boot drive and has the bootloader on it (when I want to boot ubuntu I hit F11 and select the second entry for that drive in the menu.) Previous distro installs have had no problem installing right over top of that and disk #4, but for whatever reason Nobara has failed to install the boot loader and I have no idea how to even begin to resolve this. I’ve done some searching and only found results with similar situations that aren’t quite the same, it seems this is commonly an issue with linux installs into partitions of a drive that is shared with windows, but that’s not what I’m doing (at least not for the main install, I guess that is kind of what it’s doing with the bootloader?)

I can manually erase disk #4 if that would help, but is there some way I can manually go in and clear out the old bootloader (without messing up the windows install/boot)?

Other specs in case it’s relevant:

  • Ryzen 7 3800X 3.9GHz 8-core CPU
  • 32GB DDR4-3200 RAM
  • Gigabite Vision OC 12 RTX3060 GPU
  • vfscanf()@discuss.tchncs.de
    8·
    2 days ago

    That’s normal. On BIOS systems the stage 1 bootloader (which is what this command installs) is always i386, see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB#Installation_2 .

    What surprises me is that the installer runs in BIOS mode, because your system should be recent enough to use EFI. When you boot into the installer, you should make sure to select the boot entry that has EFI in its name. That might be the problem, but without seeing the output of grub-install, it’s hard to tell.