Manjaro UEFI installation - Unable to find boot partition after reboot

Question

Hope everyone is safe during these times! I have a Dell Optiplex 3060 Micro Form Factor. I changed the BIOS settings to what I know it should be for a Linux installation - disable Secure Boot, disable Fast Boot, change from Legacy Boot to UEFI boot, enable AHCI. I;m installing Manjaro KDE 21.0.4 using Ventoy USB bootable drive. I used the Calamares GUI installer and set up manual partitioning as follows:

-- /dev/sda (OCZ 120GB SSD on SATA port 0):
   512 Mb , fat32     , /boot/efi , flags = boot (no esp option in Calamares)
   103 Gb , ext4      , /         , flags = root
   8 Gb   , linuxswap ,           , flags = swap

-- /dev/sdb (Hynix 256GB M.2 SSD on SATA port 1):
   256 Gb , ext4      , /home

My BIOS is configured as per the images below:

Boot Sequence: Advanced Boot Options: UEFI Boot Path Security: Drives - I don't know why the M.2 SSD is shown under SATA-1 and not 'M.2 PCIe SSD-0': UEFI Capsule Firmware Updates: Secure Boot Enable: Fastboot: Boot options (F12) after restart: I've tried twice now, once using the OCZ SSD as the installation destination, and the Hynix M.2 SSD as the other.

Upon restart, the Dell POSTS into a memory test and thereafter states that it cannot find a partition to boot from.

Please enlighten me if there is anything I have done incorrectly, or if anyone lese has had similar issues. Apologies for the long post. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Nevermind, facepalm moment. I figured out what the problem was. Should've tried it before posting here. However, for anyone interested, the problem appeared to be the Ventoy utility. I created a new USB bootable drive using Rufus (DD Mode), followed the same steps as my outlined in my original post, an everything now works 100%.