Arch Linux

hellopeach

Member

Registered: 2009-10-18

Posts: 5

[SOLVED] How to repair UEFI boot?

I have installed Arch Linux on my notebook and used it for the past half year with little problem, however yesterday I wanted to resize the root partition to make room for a separate data partition, so I downloaded the gparted live ISO and burned it to a USB drive. As the gparted live ISO doesn't support uefi boot, so I went into the UEFI menu and changed the boot mode to legacy. Then the boot screen for the gparted Live CD shows up, and I selected the default boot. However it seems something is wrong with the gparted Live ISO (or the USB drive may be defective), as it goes into a blank screen for minutes without any response.

So I figured I'd give up resizing the root partition and change back the boot mode to UEFI, one thing I noticed immediately is that the boot options list in the UEFI interface is now empty without showing the HDD entry as before. And after I reboot the machine, it shows a "no bootable device found" error.

So I get back my Arch installation USB drive and plugged it in, and immediately it shows up as an entry in the UEFI boot options, and I can boot into the Arch installation shell. From there I did fdisk -l and looked at my HDD device (sda in my case), and everything seems okay. There's a sda1 which has the boot and esp flags, and sda2 which is my swap partiton, and sda3 is my root parition. I mounted the sda1 and sda3 partitions and checked their content and everything seems okay too, the sda1 partition has the correctly-looking EFI/GRUB/grub.efi file, the sda3 partition has the /boot directory with all things seems normal.

So right now I'm kinda at a loss here, it seems the bootable flags and content of the partitions are correct, however the UEFI just doesn't think it's a bootable device somehow. The only things that I have done are switching the boot mode to legacy and a failed attempt at booting up the gparted Live CD (without doing any change to the partition at all), then switching back to UEFI boot mode. So any idea what might have went wrong and how it might be fixed?

I have tried to reinstall GRUB as per the wiki suggests but that doesn't work (and I don't think the grub files were damaged in the first place anyway), and as the nodebook can boot the Arch installation media in UEFI mode I think the UEFI firmware is not the problem here?

Last edited by hellopeach (2019-10-25 04:10:52)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,740

Re: [SOLVED] How to repair UEFI boot?

That doesn't work is not an error messge, post the command you used to reinstall GRUB as well as

lsblk -f
efibootmgr -v

from the "proper" chroot with all the right partitions set up.

FWIW your EFI firmware is almost definitely the problem here and will have wiped all NVRAM entries during the switch. That's normal and fixable by reinstalling the bootloader

hellopeach

Member

Registered: 2009-10-18

Posts: 5

Re: [SOLVED] How to repair UEFI boot?

That doesn't work is not an error messge, post the command you used to reinstall GRUB as well as

lsblk -f
efibootmgr -v

from the "proper" chroot with all the right partitions set up.

FWIW your EFI firmware is almost definitely the problem here and will have wiped all NVRAM entries during the switch. That's normal and fixable by reinstalling the bootloader

You are right, this is definitely something wonky about the UEFI firmware. Just after posting this thread, I have realized that after reinstalling the GRUB bootloader, I have only done reboots, no poweroff. Now after I powered off the notebook and turned it back on, the UEFI shows the HDD entry correctly and boots okay, so somehow the UEFI entries are only updated after a power off/on but not reboot. oh well thanks for the tip.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,740

Re: [SOLVED] How to repair UEFI boot?

Different UEFI implementations can contain all sorts of weirdness.

Please mark as [SOLVED] by editing the title in your first post.