Trouble creating a boot partition in Gparted

Installing Zorin OS
1

I'm trying to install Zorin OS to an M.2 drive and I think I’ve hit a roadblock.

Creating a partition in the installer turned out to be a bad idea since I kept getting the ’ubi-partman’ error. So I took the advice of most other users and tried to partition the drive with Gparted in Ubuntu Live.

And here’s where I got stuck. I created a 200MB FAT32 partition. I tried to flag it as ’boot’ (which automatically selects ’esp’ as well.) It would not let me apply my operations after that. When I checked the partition information, it showed a warning that the computer is unable to read the contents of the file system.

The warning also mentions that dosfstools and mtools are required for FAT32 files. I have installed dosfstools in the terminal, but nothing has changed even after rebooting. When I try to install mtools, I receive an error saying it has no installation candidate.

And that's where I am now. Hopefully, someone can help me get through this.

2

Hi, a /boot/efi partition should be 512 Mb in size. I've had weird experience on other distros using GParted only to be told in a different window to change FAT32 to VFAT! Zorin comes with GParted during install, you don't need to use GParted live for this. Choose the something else option at point of install.

  1. When GParted launches after choosing 'something else' at point of install,
  2. Delete all partitions.
  3. Create 512 Mb FAT32 partition and edit the flag as /boot/efi
  4. Create 80 Gb Ext4 partition for '/' (root file partition.
  5. Format the rest of the drive Ext4 and mark as '/home'.

After install you will need to setup TRIM or check if fstrim is already available.

3

Do You want to install only Zorin on Your Machine? If yes, You could use in the Installer the ''Erase disk'' Option. Then the Installer cares about the Partitions and make them automatically.

Or do You want create a Dual-Boot System?

4

If above suggestions will still not work, try re-creating the partition table. As far as the size, 300mb is a good boot partition size for me. Never had an issue. I just installed Zorin today actually and thats exactly what I have.

Just a fair warning though. Re-creating the partition table will delete everything.

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