Anaconda allowing /boot partition of type BTRFS when using manual partitionning

Hi there,

I’ve just installed Fedora 43 using the new installer’s UI to manually partition my disks (several disks, encrypted partitions, RAID1, etc.).
I’ve (unwisely) chose btrfs for my /boot resulting in Grub having trouble booting with full features, as mentioned in this topic.

At start-up, I don’t have the usual Grub menu but this error instead:

Failed to open \EFI\fedora\ - Not Found
error: ../../grub-core/commands/loadenv.c:216:sparse file not allowed.

The issue is the same as described in this other topic.

I wasn’t aware that /boot should not use btrfs, I’ve learned that searching for the Grub error.

Still, Anaconda allowed me to install F43 with a non-Grub-friendly /boot partition when in manual partitioning without raising error.
I’d hope it would pop an error message like “/boot should use EXT4, btrfs not fully supported”

I also have a /boot/efi of type fat16, because the installer suggested this config, so I guess the same can be done for /boot.

Thanks for taking this suggestion into account for future versions.

I’ve just formatted /boot to ext4 and I can see the grub menu at startup.
But the following error is still there:

Failed to open \EFI\fedora\ - Not Found

Anyway, to change /boot partition type from btrfs to ext4, I did the following:

  1. Backup data: rsync -av /boot/ /mnt/backup-boot
  2. Unmount EFI: umount /boot/efi
  3. Unmount boot: umount /boot
  4. Format: mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdf2 -L boot it will give the new partition uuid
  5. Replace old /boot entry in /etc/fstab by the new one (UUID=XX /boot ext4 defaults 0 0)
  6. Remount /boot: mount /boot
  7. Restore backup: rsync -av /mnt/backup-boot/ /boot
  8. Mount everything back (including /boot/efi): mount -a && systemctl daemon-reload
  9. Remove old Grub configs: rm /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
  10. Create new Grub config files: dnf reinstall grub2-common (seen here)
  11. Restart should be working fine on the new ext4 filesystem.