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I installed Arch Linux yesterday purely for the learning experience. Knowing very little about partitioning I created a primary EFI partition(sda1), a primary swap partition(sda2) and a primary root partition(sda3). Thinking I want to install my other Linux system later on I also created a 4th partition. While Arch did successfully install I am now stuck trying to install my regular Parrot OS.

I was just informed that I can only have 4 primary partitions so I created an extended one (grey). That one I partitioned like Arch would have wanted me to, but Parrot won't give me an option to continue.

During previous Parrot installs I could just select a partition in the colored bar graph on top and then resize however I wished. This time I can't.

Also Arch installation used UEFI but the partitions seem to be MBR. According to the guides that shouldn't be a thing but I probably misunderstand something.

I feel like there is a glaring error here, but I can't seem to find out how to do it properly.

Can somebody point me in the right direction?

edit: The selected drive is the only physical hard-drive I have

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Also Arch installation used UEFI but the partitions seem to be MBR. According to the guides that shouldn't be a thing but I probably misunderstand something.

MBR is allowed in UEFI, although officially it's a combination only meant for removable drives and e.g. Windows won't support it for the system disk, but most firmwares (and many other operating systems) allow it for all kinds of storage.

You can use gdisk (aka gptfdisk) to convert the disk in-place to GPT partitioning. (You will need to reinstall the bootloaders i.e. re-run grub-install after doing so.)

However, you really don't need that many partitions – it's enough to have one EFI System Partition shared between all operating systems on that disk, and both Linux systems can share one swap partition as well. So EFI + swap + Arch + Parrot would actually fit within the 4 primary slots of an MBR disk (though I would not recommend).

(Also, GRUB can boot from MBR logical partitions – I'm not sure why the Parrot installer doesn't allow it.)

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  • I didn't know the systems could share one EFI partition! I assigned the EFI Partition a mount point of /boot/efi and the 4th partition the mount point / during Parrot install. Then Parrot would install but upon reboot it was not recognized. Only Arch would boot from drive. When trying to install Parrot again the Parrot installer already recognized itself as installed on the 4th partition. When installing again nothing changed however. After restart only Arch comes up as a boot option.
    – user1699544
    Commented Nov 9, 2022 at 20:30
  • Sorry, my mistake. I forgot to check the boot options before posting. It's all working. Thanks so much!
    – user1699544
    Commented Nov 10, 2022 at 11:52
  • If you feel chatty you could give me a hint about why you wouldn't recommend what I just did (EFI + swap + Arch + Parrot all being primary partitions). I will research the topic myself, maybe just a keyword. Is it safety or speed? Possible data corruption?
    – user1699544
    Commented Nov 10, 2022 at 12:04
  • No, it mostly just prevents you from creating a 5th partition of any kind. (Normally the 4th slot is an "extended" partition that holds logical partitions – but if you already have all 4 slots occupied by normal primary partitions...) It also means you're using MBR on an UEFI system, which seems a bit pointless? Use GPT.
    – grawity_u1686
    Commented Nov 10, 2022 at 12:11
  • Okay! On the next install I will switch to GPT. For this week I need a running system on that machine, but I will dive into the topic further. I don't yet know the difference between GPT and MBR other than the partitioning limitation. But I'll find out soon enough. Thank you again for your help, that was really important right now.
    – user1699544
    Commented Nov 10, 2022 at 12:34

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