Mageia forum

I am trying to upgrade from Mageia6 to 7 but it is stuck with the error 'you must have a ESP FAT32 partition mounted in /boot/EFI'. HELP I am non-techinal just a user!!

I have looked at my partitions and have the following:-
1mb BIOS BOOT OR EMPTY PARTITION
50gb /
3.4gb SWAP
877gb HOME
I have no idea if this helps.

It might help if you mention how you actually want to perform the update. From your description it seems you got the DVD image and tried to boot from that to do the upgrade?
Seems your system is booting in UEFI mode. Please see https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Installing_o ... boot_media
for comparison, even when the screenshots are not the most recent.

Please try to boot in BIOS mode instead of UEFI, then try the upgrade again. If that doesn't work, you can also upgrade online: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_7_Rel ... _.28GUI.29

I put the DVD in and it only gives me 2 choices:-
Install Mageia 7
Rescue system
I haven't a clue what to do.
I tried the Network version but it said it didn't exist.
HELP!!

please give the full title of the installer boot menu as shown.

does it have "efi" in the title?

if so make and model of your computer so that we can advise how to get into your BIOS and make the necessary change

Where's the boot menu?
My computer was a barebones unit from Novatech UK with an AMD CPU and an NVidia Graphics card. A 1TB disk was added. It is about 3 years old.

paulcbrennan2001 wrote:I put the DVD in and it only gives me 2 choices:-
Install Mageia 7
Rescue system

this boot menu.

it has a title above it

something like Mageia7 ...

regarding the system, what motherboard?

It says Mageia 7 (64-bit EFI)
Not sure what the motherboard is but I think Novatech use Gigabyte.
Hope this helps thanks.

ok,

what we know is that you do not have a /boot/efi partition.
this means that your system was installed in Legacy or CSM mode.
you have a bios boot partition, that tells me you have a GPT partitioning scheme.
you are booting the system in UEFI mode, unfortunately, 1MB is too small for a /boot/EFI partition.

you do have a gigabyte m/b.
restart your system with your USB / DVD inserted.

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from gigabyte:
<F12>: BOOT MENU    Boot Menu allows you to set the first boot device without entering BIOS Setup. In Boot Menu, use the up arrow key <h> or the down arrow key <i> to select the first boot device, then press <Enter> to accept. To exit Boot Menu, press <Esc>. The system will directly boot from the device configured in Boot Menu. Note: The setting in Boot Menu is effective for one time only. After system restart, the device boot order will still be based on BIOS Setup settings. You can access Boot Menu again to change the first boot de-vice setting as needed

so, from the above, press F12, and choose your USB / DVD menu entry that does not include UEFI

regards

It installed but now I have another problem. After the Mageia Intro (the bouncing circles) all I have is a fleshing cursor in the left hand top corner. HELP!!

reboot and choose advanced boot menu( from the Mageia grub menu)
then choose recovery which will give a scrolling text window

when able, log in to a tty ( ctrl+alt+F2) as root.
run

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drakx11

using keyboard navigation choose another driver for your graphics card: nouveau or vesa.
you can run "test" to check that it willwork
save and reboot

Success!! Many, many thanks.

sweet.

which driver did you select?

If you are now running a free driver for your video card, lets see if we can fix that, so that you are running the non-free driver, if you like.

in a root terminal, run that drakx11 again and report back which driver Mageia thinks you should be using- screenshot is ok.
also output of

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lcpsidrake

I selected nouveau and then it was installing the nvidia driver - odd?

I had the same error on a brand new laptop. "you must have a ESP FAT32 partition mounted on /boot/EFI"

There was no "ESP FAT32" partition type in expert mode of the partitioning tool. I tried plain Fat 32 and mounted it on /boot/EFI but got the same error. Could not find how others got past this. Finally I selected EFI System on a guess, formatted it and mounted it on /boot/EFI, then the install worked fine. Just posting in case someone else had the error.