Arch Linux

phluxcoblt

Member

Registered: 2021-08-01

Posts: 8

Intermittent Boot Issue: Checking Media Presence / UEFI + GRUB

Hello Fellow Arch Linux lovers,

Summary:

After rebooting, instead of reaching the GRUB bootloader, my system occasionally shows "Checking media presence..." and "No offer received" messages, implying an attempt to boot via network (PXE boot, IPv4 and then IPv6). The GRUB menu does not appear unless I press ESC, and even then, it does not always appear.

Details:

I'm encountering an intermittent boot issue on my fresh Arch Linux install. I have Arch on a dozen machines at home and wanted to use this 2012-13 laptop for various things (12GB RAM, i7 CPU, 1TB storage, etc., a good machine for its age). I was logged in on my new system, I had finished installing all my packages and my system was finally ready to use: my programming tools, xfce, etc. I had just installed lightdm and decided to reboot to check that everything works as expected.

However, when I restarted, instead of seeing GRUB, I saw checking media presence, I saw those messages:  checking media presence... media present... start PXE over IPv6 press esc to exit.. no offer received.

I thought I may have made a boot order mistake in my BIOS, but I pressed ESC once, the message reappeared, start PXE etc. I pressed ESC again and this time the GRUB menu appeared. I use only Arch so I pressed on Arch and my system booted properly. Since the boot process is so fast, I decided to restart the system right away to correct the weird boot order in my BIOS. When I checked the BIOS, no issue at all! HDD/SSD first, second USB, third CD/DVD, fourth LAN Atheros LAN for IPv4. Nothing unusual.

So I looked for an option to remove the option of bootins via network but it is no an option in BIOS Aptio Utility Setup copyright ©️ 2012 American Megatrends, Inc.

At that point, I thought, if it is not a boot order issue, I must continue investigating. I decided to restart the system from the Arch Linux live USB, I chrooted and reinstalled GRUB just in case. No issue. It even reappeared once (after pressing ESC twice on the detecting media presence screen) and then same old thing again when I did a reboot later on.

Then, I started thinking it was maybe due directly to disk issues. After trying over 30 times to see the GRUB screen after pressing ESC on the detecting media presence screen, I just used the live USB again, I chrooted my system, used tools like smartontools' smartctl on my endire disk /dev/sda in my case.

Then, I tried badblocks, it returns absolutely no error.

Then I tried fsck and it returned absolutely no error either, just things like the following for sda1 (/boot) and sda3 (/):

 fsck from util-linux 2.38.1
Fsck.fat 4.2 (2021-01-31)
/dev/sda1: 369 files, 27868/127738 clusters

Besides, everything seems perfectly fine when I chroot into my system. I am now running out of ideas for a diagnosis. Could it be the symptom of a slowly failing disk?

Thank you!