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radmac

Member

Registered: 2019-03-12

Posts: 18

[SOLVED] System suddenly stopped booting (systemd-boot & EFI)

The PC is MacBook Air 2014, dual-boot with MacOS.
I use systemd-boot installed on EFI partition, mounted on /boot directory
(the same partition that contains MacOS bootloader).

Suddenly, the system won't boot, the symptoms are following:

I can boot MacOS from the same EFI partition without any issues.
If I choose Linux (booted with systemd-boot) I get black screen only (the backlight is on).
I tried to reinstall the bootloader from installation USB drive after chrooting into my system,
during that I get error message: "Failed to create EFI Boot variable entry: Invalid argument".
EFI binaries are copied, though and efivarsfs is mounted as expected.
If I try to go into UEFI shell from main boot menu of the installation USB drive I got the same black screen as well.
From MacOS I can mount and browse all relevant partitions (root & EFI mounted on / & /boot).

I am not sure if this can be related to some later update, I reboot my laptop rarely.

[UPDATE]

So I tried to skip systemd-boot completely and switch to EFISTUB.
However, when adding new entry, I got probably the same error message:
"Could not prepare Boot variable: Invalid argument".

Last edited by radmac (2022-11-18 15:02:37)

radmac

Member

Registered: 2019-03-12

Posts: 18

Re: [SOLVED] System suddenly stopped booting (systemd-boot & EFI)

I still do not know what is causing UEFI not working properly on my machine, but I found workaround.

Download rEFInd EFI binary from the webpage and use it to replace /boot/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI which is apparantly some sort of default EFI binary.
The rEFInd is able to locate all necessary files from the same partition needed to boot the system. Once inside, one can set things properly.

blackout23

Member

Registered: 2011-11-16

Posts: 781

Re: [SOLVED] System suddenly stopped booting (systemd-boot & EFI)

I have the same issue on an Macbook Air 2015. Have been using it for years with Linux without issues and it borked itself recently. I also did not install any macOS updates recently.
I thought it might be an issue with systemd-boot and wanted to roll it back, but since also efibootmgr can not be used anymore I suspect that Apple somehow changed the firmware thourgh an update?

UPDATE: "Fixed" it by using refind which I installed through macOS. Looks like systemd-boot broke for macbooks with last release.

Last edited by blackout23 (2022-11-19 18:00:29)

Zodigram

Member

Registered: 2022-05-16

Posts: 15

Re: [SOLVED] System suddenly stopped booting (systemd-boot & EFI)

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/25363

the issue with systemd has been resolved, and the latest package works on my Macbook again