Arch Linux

distilledchaos

Member

Registered: 2014-06-20

Posts: 3

refind upgrade breaks boot

I upgraded a couple computers that were months to years out of date (got to go through the joy of updating a pacman from the pre-xstandard days ).

Both computers had been using refind-efi, which has since been replaced by refind. After upgrading both computers to refind 0.12.0-6, they still entered refind as expected, but would apparently refuse to boot into Arch - they'd boot Windows instead. Prior to booting Windows, refind very briefly showed "Booting OS" along with the (expected) kernel parameters, and apparently displayed no errors. On downgrade back to refind-efi 0.11.3-1, it worked again. I tried all five intervening 0.12.0 patches with no luck. I tried adding debug, ignore_loglevel, earlyprintk=efi,keep and log_buf_len to no avail. I also tried acpi=off for the heck of it.

I can settle for sticking with refind-efi for now - it's been working fine for me on many systems for years, but I would like to understand what broke here. What else can I try, and am I the only one running into this with refind?

nytborn

Member

Registered: 2020-04-24

Posts: 1

Re: refind upgrade breaks boot

Hello. You are not alone. I upgraded refind yesterday. On booting up I could see only the refind logo. I have a laptop with both Windows and Linux installed; Windows came with the laptop on the hard disk, Arch Linux on manually installed ssd. My system was stuck with showing just the refind logo... it didn't even boot to Windows like yours did.

I created a pacman hook for refind (as suggested in ArchWiki) when I first installed Arch Linux (~9 months ago). Since the package name was changed to refind from refind-efi, I guessed it was because of this that the hook didn't run post-upgrade and broke boot. So I tried running refind-install using the arch iso on a usb stick... it didn't work. I saw a new refind_linux.conf file in /boot (my esp is /boot/efi) which I don't believe was there before, and it had different contents compared to refind_linux.conf in my esp. So I tried modifying /boot/refind_linux.conf to match the one in my esp. This didn't work either.

I looked at your post and downgraded to refind-efi. This works for me as well, everything is back to normal.