After update cannot boot, grub error

Support
1

I have tried twice to install the latest update. The first failed with the following error:

"error: symbol 'grub_memcpy' not found. 
Entering rescue mode ... 
grub rescue>

I then did a full Timeshift restore and I monitored the forum for a few days to see if there were any changes to the update or if anyone else had this issue.

I tried again this morning but I logged out, entered a tty session and deleted the .cache first.

I got the same error as above, i.e. I cannot login. I have a vfat 500mb boot/efi partition. I cannot enter any ordinary terminal commands like lsblk or fdisk as the commands are not recognised from the grub rescue> prompt.

Any suggestions or do I commence another Timeshift restore?

2

it has been discussed here in the past two days

booting the installer ISo from USB or whatever
and then
manjaro-chroot -a
or the manual way when you use BTRFS
and then running:
install-grub
should remedy this situation

3

Wouldn’t I need to do a Timeshift restore to run the chroot command?

4

No.

Then you’d presumably be in the state before the update - and would need to do it again.
… but:
I don’t know how you use timeshift …

5

I did a timeshift restore and run install-grub, it worked.

6

Thanks @ceres, I will try that.

7

Boot up from the installer USB and chroot into your installed system. The procedure follows below… :backhand_index_pointing_down:

  1. In the live session, open up a terminal window. In this terminal window, issue the following command… :backhand_index_pointing_down:

    sudo -i

  2. Mount the filesystems of your installed system — the sample commands below use /dev/sda1 for the EFI system partition and /dev/sda2 for the root partition, but you should adapt this to what applies on your system. :backhand_index_pointing_down:

    mount -t btrfs -o subvol=@ /dev/sda2 /mnt
mount -t btrfs -o subvol=@home /dev/sda2 /mnt/home
mount -t btrfs -o subvol=@log /dev/sda2 /mnt/var/log
mount -t btrfs -o subvol=@cache /dev/sda2 /mnt/var/cache
mount -t vfat  /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/efi
mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount -t proc proc /mnt/proc
mount -t sysfs sysfs /mnt/sys
mount -t efivarfs efivarfs /mnt/sys/firmware/efi/efivars
chroot /mnt /bin/bash

  3. Install install-grub from the repositories… :backhand_index_pointing_down:

    pacman -S install-grub

  4. Run the script. :backhand_index_pointing_down:

    install-grub

  5. Cleanly reboot your system and remove the USB stick from the port.

8

however, I lost my swapfile. I recreated it without an issue.

9

Tried your procedure but do get errors in step 3 (pacman …) - “Creating Timeshift … failed … unable to run timeshift autosnap… Please close timeshift and try again …” So my question is how to get around this issue, have not found anything to “close” timeshift.

10

When I started btrfs on Manjaro over 3 years ago, there wasn’t much on the forums here for this. The above Arch way did always work, but I have been to use manjaro-chroot for a way easier process. I have used it hundreds of times on many systems.

I have always done all of those steps in just these 3:

sudo mount /dev/sda2 -o subvol=@ /mnt
sudo manjaro-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
mount -a

Just a few less steps.

Most people that haven’t touched Manjaro’s defaults, can even just:
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

You don’t even need the -o subvol=@. Manjaro comes with the default root subvolume of: @. But if you have changed the btrfs subvolume set-default to a different volume, you will need a proper subvol or subvolid option here. So it always safe to leave it in, when we know we want subvol=@.

(Snapper uses the default root volume for its own purpose as well.)

Just to show you @Aragorn..

manjaro-chroot handles all the virtual FSs, and mount -a will get the EFI and btrfs mounts from your /etc/fstab.

In the chroot, before and after mount -a:

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda2       242G   72G  169G  30% /
efivarfs        256K  149K  103K  60% /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
udev            5.8G     0  5.8G   0% /dev
shm             5.9G     0  5.9G   0% /dev/shm
run             5.9G     0  5.9G   0% /run
tmp             5.9G     0  5.9G   0% /tmp
overlay         8.8G  1.9G  7.0G  21% /etc/resolv.conf
$ mount -a
$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
# Same plus these..
/dev/vda1       300M  320K  300M   1% /boot/efi
/dev/vda2       242G   72G  169G  30% /home
/dev/vda2       242G   72G  169G  30% /var/cache
/dev/vda2       242G   72G  169G  30% /var/log

(The rare time with problems, I have had to mount /mnt/boot/efi before the chroot.)

3 Likes
11

This I cannot answer you. :man_shrugging:

Apparently you have a timeshift autosnap script running — possibly as a pacman hook, and quite possibly if you have snapper installed. I have neither of those things, so… :man_shrugging:

12

If it’s a stale lock file, you could try: sudo rm /var/lock/timeshift/lock

If it’s something else, we would need pacman and/or system logs.