Attempting to Reinstall Grub - Blocklists Error Message

Hi everyone

I inadvertently switched off power to my desktop PC during the Manjaro shutdown process. Now my boot partition is corrupted and my PC won’t boot. I only get the GRUB command line when booting.

I followed the instructions in the Manjaro wiki (Restore_the_GRUB_Bootloader). But it doesn’t work because I receive the following error -

grub-install /dev/sda6

Installing for i386-pc platform.
grub-install: warning: File system `fat’ doesn’t support embedding.
grub-install: warning: Embedding is not possible. GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists. However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged…
grub-install: error: will not proceed with blocklists.

I received the same error when I reformatted the boot partition as ext4.

I tried using --force with grub-install. This appeared to work, but Grub only finds my Windows partition, not my Manjaro one.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! :slight_smile:

You’re trying to install grub to a specific partition. The referenced wiki page doesn’t event mention this.
You probably wanted to

$ sudo grub-install /dev/sda

Welcom at the forum, @PatrickF, please boot into a live ISO, open a terminal window and apply following commands:

sudo parted -l
lsblk -f
efibootmgr -v
ls -la /boot

Post the output here in the forum. We need to know if you are booting in BIOS or UEFI mode and if your disk is gpt or msdos parted.

Thank you, freggel.doe. I had misread the instructions. Unfortunately, still only the Windows partition is listed.

Thank you for your welcome, Wollie. Here is the output (the Windows partition is a legacy partition - it doesn’t contain a functional operating system) -

sudo parted -l
Model: ATA ST3250312AS (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 250GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 1049kB 3520MB 3519MB primary ntfs
2 3520MB 213GB 210GB primary ext4
3 213GB 230GB 17.2GB primary linux-swap(v1)
4 230GB 250GB 19.6GB extended
6 230GB 231GB 1074MB logical fat32
5 231GB 250GB 18.6GB logical ext4

lsblk -f
NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINT
loop0
loop1
loop2
loop3
sda
|-sda1
|-sda2
|-sda3
|-sda4
|-sda5 1.1G 88% /
`-sda6 1014.2M 1% /boot

efibootmgr -v
EFI variables are not supported on this system.

ls -la /boot
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jan 1 1970 .
drwxr-xr-x 18 root root 4096 Jul 21 09:07 …
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Sep 3 09:14 grub

The required commands need to be done after chrooting. So start with a live iso, open a terminal window and chroot by

sudo manjaro-chroot -a

(select 1 if only one line is given)

As you have a msdos parted disk and booted via legacy mode (BIOS) the right commands to restore the grub bootloader are (as mentioned by @freggel.doe already):

grub-install /dev/sda
update grub
exit

After exiting chroot and terminal - reboot.

Hi Wollie

Thanks for your help and quick response :slightly_smiling_face:. I have followed your instructions, but (as happened previously) even though both my boot (/dev/sda6) and Linux system (/dev/sda5) partitions are mounted, grub-install finds only my Windows 7 system on /dev/sda1.

I am disappointed by what seems to me to be a lack of resilience in Linux or Grub (I don’t know which). This has all happened simply because I inadvertently switched off power to my desktop PC during the Manjaro shutdown process. I am not a huge fan of Windows, but at least I think it would have recovered from this mistake much more robustly.

Thanks again for your help. It looks like a reinstall might be my only option. Should I stick with Manjaro and Grub, or are there other options?

I fear that your attempts to fix with

caused more corruption as this is the wrong command., forcing it makes it even worse. The /boot partition could be ext4 but I don’t understand why you formatted it, by that you most likely lost all kernels.

Can you post the exact error message? grub-install must be given the disk device in a BIOS install not a partition, so the right syntax is

grub-install /dev/sda

No numbers behind sda.

If you lost the kernels, you could try to reinstall them. Do you remember what kernel you used? In the following procedure I have considered linux54, but if you think another kernel was installed you can replace it, for example by linux419 if you used 4.19.

So here the complete procedure:

Boot into a live ISO as done before.

sudo manjaro-chroot -a

(select 1 if only one line is given)

grub-install /dev/sda
mhwd-kernel -i linux54
mkinitcpio -P

depmod -a {edited}

update grub
exit

If there are errors, copy them and post them completely, every detail could be important.

Hi Wollie

Thanks again for your assistance - I really appreciate it.

Formatting the boot partition was a (mistaken) attempt to get around the blocklists error (which I think was the result of misreading the instructions and typing grub-install /dev/sda6 instead of grub-install /dev/sda).

I now have a different UUID for this partition from what Manjaro looks for when chrooting (in the fstab?). I get around this with the following command, then exit and chroot again:

[manjaro /]# mv /dev/disk/by-uuid/71DA-ECE5 /dev/disk/by-uuid/5103-0392

I received an error when running the mhwd-kernel command. Here is the output (from manjaro-chroot onwards):

[manjaro@manjaro ~]$ sudo manjaro-chroot -a
==> Detected systems:
–> 0) Windows
–> 1) ManjaroLinux
==> Select system to mount [0-1] :
1
==> Mounting (ManjaroLinux) [/dev/sda5]
–> mount: [/mnt]
–> mount: [/mnt/boot]
–> mount: [/mnt/run/media/patrick/c0e4573a-3d71-45cb-b21e-14e6f3de9abb]
mount: /mnt/run/media/patrick/c0e4573a-3d71-45cb-b21e-14e6f3de9abb: mount point does not exist.

[manjaro /]# grub-install /dev/sda
Installing for i386-pc platform.
Installation finished. No error reported.
[manjaro /]# mhwd-kernel -i linux54
:: Synchronizing package databases…
core 168.7 KiB 180 KiB/s 00:01 [######################] 100%
extra 2013.9 KiB 338 KiB/s 00:06 [######################] 100%
community 6.1 MiB 1298 KiB/s 00:05 [######################] 100%
multilib 194.9 KiB 2.29 MiB/s 00:00 [######################] 100%
The following packages are out of date, please update your system first: archlinux-appstream-data archlinux-keyring binutils ca-certificates-mozilla cups curl dnsmasq engrampa fuse-common fuse3 gcc gcc-libs glib2 glibc hwids iana-etc intel-gmmlib iputils lib32-gcc-libs lib32-glib2 lib32-glibc lib32-libva-mesa-driver lib32-mesa lib32-mesa-vdpau lib32-systemd lib32-vulkan-intel lib32-vulkan-radeon libcap libcups libinput libmm-glib libnm libnsl libp11-kit libpipeline libpurple libreoffice-still libtool libutil-linux libva-mesa-driver lightdm linux-api-headers linux54 man-pages manjaro-system mariadb-libs mesa mesa-vdpau mhwd-nvidia-450xx modemmanager mpfr mpg123 nano networkmanager nspr nss openresolv opera p11-kit pam pambase pango perl-libwww pidgin python-reportlab sqlite systemd systemd-libs systemd-sysvcompat thin-provisioning-tools util-linux vlc vulkan-intel vulkan-radeon xfce4-weather-plugin xfsprogs
Do you want to continue anyway? [y/N] y
error: no targets specified (use -h for help)

Normally mhwd-kernel is the preferred method to install kernels. In your case I would try tp replace the line with mhwd-kernel by

pacman-mirrors -f && pacman -Syu linux54

Hi Wollie

Thanks again for your help.

The two commands
pacman-mirrors -f && pacman -Syu linux54
and
mkinitcpio -P
both appeared to work successfully.

When I ran depmod -a, I received the following error messages:
depmod: ERROR: could not open directory /lib/modules/5.6.15-1-MANJARO: No such file or directory
depmod: FATAL: could not search modules: No such file or directory

Thanks again for your assistance with this.

This can be ignored. depmod -a was not needed in your case, I will edit my post. After a reboot everything should be fine.

Hi again Wollie

Thank you! I had to edit /etc/fstab, because of the new UUID for the boot partition (after I had reformatted it). After that, my system booted successfully and I am back up and running. Hooray - what a relief!

Thank you again, Wollie - I greatly appreciate all your help with this!!

Congrats, I’m glad it worked! :smiley:

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