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I was following the official installation tutorial. Everything was smooth until the boot loader section.

I had encountered the error of 

/usr/bin/grub-probe: error: failed to get canonical path of 'airootfs'.

same as this question while executing the command:

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

I was installing arch on VirtualBox and was following the official's wiki tutorial GRUB section step by step.

I can boot into grub successfully but all that I can see is only a grub shell. As a inference, I think it has derailed since the step to generate the grub configuration file. Hope that my info is helpful.

BTW in fact, I had also encountered this error in the previous step - installing the grub

grub-install --target=i386-pc /dev/sda

I added the root directory parameter and it went on without appearing error.

grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

I did so because I mounted my main Linux partition /dev/sda3 on /mnt but there isn't any root or boot directory parameter for me to use in grub-mkconfig.

Here is my partition table displayed by fdisk utility: mypartitiontable

Thx a lot. Regards.

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  • what error? which error? Commented Feb 9, 2016 at 13:30
  • @user137124 just a mistake. Sorry for my unclear title. Still, I improved it and hope for someone to reply. Commented Feb 9, 2016 at 14:00
  • Still unclear, please post the exact error message. Commented Feb 9, 2016 at 15:28
  • @JohnsonSteward I'm sorry, you must have been tired of those unclear questions. I again tried my best to describe the question. Please reply if you still don't understand the error I stated, then I'll post the full screen shot on here. Great thanks. Commented Feb 10, 2016 at 11:16
  • @李智修 seems like you should do grub2-mkconfig in the chroot instead of doing it outside. grub2-mkconfig uses grub-probe to detect real devices associated with mount points, while airootfs (archiso's rootfs) is loaded into the ram and don't have a canonical path. Commented Feb 10, 2016 at 11:20

1 Answer 1

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Seems like you should do grub2-mkconfig in the chroot instead of doing it outside. grub2-mkconfig uses grub-probe to detect real devices associated with mount points, while airootfs (archiso's rootfs) is loaded into the ram and doesn't have a canonical path.

So before installing grub and generating config, do this first:

arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
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  • I get the same errors as OP. The commands listed above result in "Error failed to setup chroot...". I wouldn't be in this fine mess if Arch did not break itself after the last update. Its amazing how often this OS breaks itself. Its worse than damn Microsoft Windows. Commented Jan 26, 2017 at 14:12
  • But I am currently fine with the use of AUR from time to time without breaking my setup. Maybe limiting the use of self-build(build from source by yourself) may help? I always enter Y when pacman ask me anything lol Commented Feb 17, 2017 at 4:04
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    But the GRUB install commands aren't available inside the chroot... Commented Feb 20, 2017 at 2:14
  • 3
    @flarn2006 You need to install the grub package inside the chroot. Commented Apr 2, 2017 at 15:39
  • 8
    @flarn2006 pacman -S grub Commented Jul 22, 2017 at 10:35

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