William Park wrote:
I can't believe this! The only distro that can install on my machine is *Fedora*. I tried
Kubuntu 25.10 Linux Mint 22.2 LMDE 7 Debian 13.2 Cachy OS Manjaro OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
They all recognize the hardwares, and install goes okay. But, at the end, they all fail on "loading grub bootloader" part. My current machine is UEFI, so I was careful to select UEFI side of any ISO. So, it's not EFI vs MBR thing.
This is my current setup:
* */dev/sda* -- Slackware * */dev/sd[bcdefgh]* -- harddisks used for backup snapshots in BTRFS filesystem. * */dev/sdi* -- This is where I want to install the new distro. It can do whatever it wants on this disk. I'll select which one to boot, from Motherboard's UEFI boot selection.
I will be dual booting for awhile. Slackware for existing simple tasks, like emails and web. Fedora for new tasks. I still can't believe it...
More than likely you need to increase UEFI partition on /dev/sda*. Slackware that took my cherries will typically create 100MB (Same as windows) size and that's not enough if you are multi booting or distro hopping and reason is cachyOS + limine (which i use) will copy multiple initramfs and vmlinuz to the UEFI partition to select or revert via multiple kernels with corresponding btrfs snapshots. Other Linux distro will do roughly the same, except a few like Fedora where it points vmlinuz and initramfs to /boot. This is probably why fedora worked for you. My UEFI Partition is currently 653MB out of 2GB, where a big portion is only 3 linux kernels + additional files for cachyOS. What's worse is distro hopping installs will fill your UEFI partition overtime and will not be removed(you have to do it yourself) and therefore, also not go overboard with lots of Linux kernels to install. I dual boot cachyOS (/dev/sdc*) and windows 11 (/dev/nvme*). have to manually expand windows UEFI fat32 partition from 100MB to 2GB for multi boot cachyOS or any Linux distro to work. This issue is not just you... i've encountered this last year too but not well publicized on the internet. /Balrog