Arch Linux

bigsad

Member

Registered: 2024-05-09

Posts: 7

Grub menu is skipped and boots straight into Arch

Hello all,

Some information that might be helpful:
Installed using archinstall w/ grub as bootloader
CPU R9 5900x
GPU Radeon RX 6800

I'm having a weird issue with a fresh install of Arch on my PC where the grub menu is being skipped when I turn on my PC. Arch is currently the only OS in my PC and before this was happening I was having another issue where I was getting a black screen when I turned on my PC and never got to the grub menu, it just hung there and nothing ever happened until I turned off my PC (or used the reboot switch) and spammed F12 go get to my bios boot menu. My bios boot menu only lists UEFI OS and that's how I'm able to get into the grub menu to pick Arch.

After poking around the troubleshooting section of the arch wiki's grub page, I found only the last topic to be relevant and tried to do what it said which was to set GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT to console. In my case I just had to uncomment the line which was already there. The other settings it suggested to change were already set to the values the guide was recommending. I then generated the grub.cfg and rebooted. This time around it booted up and I got a momentary black screen and then went right into sddm to sign into arch. From past experience with grub, I do believe that the menu should be showing up there even if I only have one OS installed. The black screen I'm referring to now appears to last the duration of the grub menu timeout but nothing actually appears and I don't see anything that would indicate that the grub menu had been set to not show up.

Not sure what I can share/ provide to see if anyone can assist. I know running efibootmgr brings this up:

BootCurrent: 0005
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0005
Boot0005* UEFI OS       HD(1,GPT,2b4caa73-de94-4a87-a1c0-2f55b4556e7f,0x800,0x200000)/\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI0000424f

This looks a bit different from other examples I've seen online. For one, shouldn't the boot order start from 0000? Not sure why it's starting from 0005. Also where it says UEFI OS, I've seen other samples say GRUB

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,223

Re: Grub menu is skipped and boots straight into Arch

What's your mainboard? That boot entry is the fallback path and doesn't necessarily have to be GRUB in the first place. It's likely that CONSOLE mode is incompatible with UEFI framebuffers I'd not inherently change that.

That entry only gets "created" if you installed grub with the --removable flag, did you do that? You'd get a proper "GRUB" entry if you used

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=esp --bootloader-id=GRUB

where esp is the mount point of your ESP. you'd see the "GRUB" entry in efibootmgr if that worked out correctly. The exact BootOrder number will also be EFI/implentation specific, which is why knowing your mainboard is the most essential puzzle piece for explaining the behaviour.

Though now that I'm rereading you mentioned archinstall, which afaik unconditionally appends --removable, which explains almost everything else.

FWIW check whether you have a CSM mode enabled, and try to disable that so your GRUB can get driven by proper UEFI video modes instead of BIOS compat configuration