Arch Linux

jungliztik

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2017-04-13

Posts: 7

Boot issues after BIOS update

Hello Arch people,

I appreciate that this may not be the right place to post given what I am doing but I'm looking to hedge my bets against other, motherboard centric, places telling me that it is a Linux issue...

Last year I built a new machine using a 9th gen Intel running on a Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Pro motherboard.  For the O/S storage, I decided to use two Samsung NVMe striped with BTRFS and it's all been working brilliantly.

sudo btrfs filesystem show
Label: 'Arch'  uuid: b167e741-49b0-4c28-b99b-819bc06c43c3
        Total devices 2 FS bytes used 383.44GiB
        devid    1 size 232.40GiB used 227.40GiB path /dev/nvme1n1p2
        devid    2 size 232.40GiB used 231.40GiB path /dev/nvme0n1p2

I wanted to look at some overclocking options to see what, if any, benefits I could get from my CPU and while researching this, I checked the BIOS updates available to me.  I am currently running the f5 BIOS which is the initial release from September 2018 and the latest stable is f11 from October 2019.  The various revisions include many microcode updates including one for potential security vulnerability and so I decided to install a newer revision.

Before installing a new BIOS update, of course, I made a backup of the current system (very glad I did).

The installation of the newer BIOS version goes fine and completes without issue, however, when the system reboots post-install then it does not find the boot device and loops back to the BIOS.  It does not seem to matter which BIOS update I try to use, they all result in similar behaviour.  Initially, I tried moving straight to f11, however, subsequently, I have tried the f10, f12d and then f6 revisions... none will boot successfully.

Looking at the boot device options available on the working system using the f5 BIOS level, the default boot option is "grub_uefi (Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 250GB)" but when I change to other BIOS revisions, this option is not there. Gigabyte f5 BIOS boot options

Is anyone able to provide any insight into what might be happening?  Any input and assistance would be greatly appreciated.

d_fajardo

Member

Registered: 2017-07-28

Posts: 1,568

Re: Boot issues after BIOS update

Your motherboard NVRAM looks like it was erased on your BIOS update. Check again efibootmgr if your system has an entry by chrooting with a live disk. If it was erased, just recreate it again with efibootmgr.

jungliztik

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2017-04-13

Posts: 7

Re: Boot issues after BIOS update

Thanks, you responded quicker than it took me to write my post! :-)

This is the first build I've done using UEFI and so it's all somewhat new to me.  I've been looking into it and think I know what to do, certainly

efibootmgr -v

returns info which looks correct from my understanding of what should be there and I'll try and replicate this after updating the BIOS version and booting into a live USB instance.

sudo efibootmgr -v BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0000,0002,0004,0005
Boot0000* grub_uefi     HD(1,GPT,f8ccdb4f-fa08-6c4a-8a39-22ebb2825f2c,0x800,0xfa000)/File(\EFI\grub_uefi\grubx64.efi)
Boot0002* Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 250GB        BBS(HD,,0x0)..BO
Boot0004* Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 250GB        BBS(HD,,0x0)..BO
Boot0005* Seagate Backup+ Hub BK D781   BBS(HD,,0x0)..BO

I shall try it when I have free time... this is my main machine and I'm paranoid about getting it wrong! :-)
Thank you again for taking the time to provide assistance... fingers crossed!