Arch Linux

Cosmonaught

Member

Registered: 2023-11-04

Posts: 8

[SOLVED] Cleanup of a bunch of GRUB loaders

So the issue started by my PC freezing, which it does weirdly often. After rebooting, grub spit out "symbol 'grub_is_shim_lock_enabled' not found". While in BIOS, if looking at bootable devices, this grub is called 'UEFI boot'

After a while I "fixed" the error. The fix in question was to install a new grub, which is called "GRUB" in BIOS:

# grub-install --target=x86_64-efi  --efi-directory=/boot/EFI --bootloader-id=GRUB --disable-shim-lock

"GRUB" works fine and boots correctly. However it is installed on sda2, on /boot/, which is a mistake because I meant to override sda1 ('UEFI boot') to basically remove it and create a new one in its place. I forgot to mount sda1 to /boot/. So now I have 2 bootable grubs, 'UEFI boot' on sda1 (the smaller partition meant for booting), and 'GRUB' on sda2 (the larger partition where Arch is).

Now, after noticing this I thought 'Hmm thats not correct, lets fix that by actually mounting sda1 and installing a new grub there!'. The new grub was called 'GRUBBER':

$~ sudo grub-install --target=x86_64-efi  --efi-directory=/boot/EFI --bootloader-id=GRUBBER --disable-shim-lock

I now have 3 bootable grubs. GRUBBER doesn't work at all. It shows up in BIOS but just freezes BIOS for a second. UEFI does not work, it still shows "symbol 'grub_is_shim_lock_enabled' not found" when I try to boot into Arch. GRUB is the only one that works, but it sits on sda2 which I assume is a bad thing.

Any help on how to get out of this situation would be appreciated.

The main question is:
How do I remove GRUBBER and UEFI Boot?

Sub questions are:

1. Is it bad that I boot into the grub on sda2 directly rather than through the smaller partition?

2. Can I actually remove and put a new GRUB on sda1 without bricking everything?

Last edited by Cosmonaught (2024-09-27 21:40:47)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,208

Re: [SOLVED] Cleanup of a bunch of GRUB loaders

Most UEFIs will remove an entry if you delete the corresponding EFI binary/folder, i.e. /boot/EFI/UEFI boot and /boot/EFI/GRUBBER. should that not be the case for some reason, look at efibootmgr -B option.  https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unifie … efibootmgr

It will generally not matter where you're running GRUB from, what's much more important where you actually mounted things to and whether e.g. your kernel images now land on a partition or root and this potentially being the trip up reason for the other entry. To properly answer those sub questions mount "/dev/sda1" to the mount point you think is correct (did you use /boot or /boot/EFI?)  and post

lsblk -f
ls -lR /boot

unmount and repeat for "/dev/sda2" (general note: these identifiers are not stable, make sure they were not accidentally mixed up between tries and you ultimately operating on the same baseline

Cosmonaught

Member

Registered: 2023-11-04

Posts: 8

Re: [SOLVED] Cleanup of a bunch of GRUB loaders

Hey thanks for the answer! Sorry to tell you I solved it my own very painful and stupid way.
I chose to try to rm -rf /boot on both sda1 and sda2 which removed everything. I had installed a grub before i rebooted but it sadly did not work for some reason so for the past 2 hours I have been trying to make a new grub.cfg file but it never detected Arch as a bootable os (os-prober does not work from within arch-chroot at all).
Your solution makes a lot of sense, I think that's the way forward.

Solution is:
Delete the unneeded EFI files inside /boot/EFI on both the main and bootable partitions.
If you need to you can delete all, or some, of /boot on either partition and reinstall but make sure you have a backup of your grub.cfg file and make sure that the backup works before you reboot.
PS: If you happen to find yourself in a never ending loop of trying and failing to find Arch with grub-mkconfig or os-prober, run pacman -S linux. os-prober should find it now.