Arch Linux

rassawyer

Member

From: Pennsylvania, USA

Registered: 2015-03-26

Posts: 23

Website

UEFI/BIOS forgets about boot drive?

Dual boot arch and win 10 on desktop rig with a WD 512 gb mm.2  nvme ssd as boot drive (three partitions, one for boot, one for arch root, and one for windows.) Mobo is an asus rog hero vi. CPU is Ryzen 1700X. Mostly its been great, but randomly I will come back to find the machine booted to bios, and seem to have completely forgotten that there is an nvme ssd.
Usually it just forgets about the boot partition, eg, the windows bootloader still shows up. This time it "forgot" all of my hard drives.

The solution that I've found is to boot from live usb, manually mount everything, and arch-chroot into my installed system, and reinstall and configure grub. While that works, it is certainly getting old. Does anyone have any ideas what might be going on? (it's never done it while i was present, so I've never seen it happen)

Edit: added info: So far it has only ever done this from Arch. Like today, I was booted into Arch, doing various things. I left for work, leaving it booted, and came home to find it booted to UEFI/BIOS, and not seeing ANY hard drives. I turned it off with the power switch, and turned it back on, and it booted to UEFI/BIOS again, and at that  point showed the Windows boot loader as a boot option, but still none of the other connected drives. Powered off, connected Arch live USB, and powered on again, and it came up with the Windows bootloader, and the USB as boot options. Booted the USB, mounted, arch-chroot,

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=boot --bootloader-id=arch_grub

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

exit, reboot, and all is well. Its done this at least a dozen times in the last 3 months. The first two or three times I did a full reinstall, before I realized that I could just reinstall grub.

Last edited by rassawyer (2018-04-18 23:16:58)

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: London

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 7,732

Website

Re: UEFI/BIOS forgets about boot drive?

Try adding the --removable flag to the `grub-install` command.

See https://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloade … ive-naming for more tips.

---

Are you infected with Wetiko?

Inchw0rm

Member

Registered: 2013-05-12

Posts: 25

Re: UEFI/BIOS forgets about boot drive?

Hi there,

I am not sure if I understood you correctly, but I myself have had problems with booting up arch.
Please note that the grub.cfg files should go into your ESP directory e. g. /boot/efi/EFI. After installing grub you should get a directory with /boot/efi/EFI/grub, with a grubx64.efi image located in there. Only this directory should be the destination for your grub.cfg file on EFI systems. Also don't forget to make a record for the EFI partition in your fstab.
Hope this helps.

- --efi-directory should be /boot/efi
- the partition should be formated as FAT12, FAT16 or FAT32

Best
inch

Last edited by Inchw0rm (2018-04-19 13:56:46)