Hello, as you can see I’m brand spanking new Manjaro. I had booted up with the disc image I put on my USB with Rufus. I’m afraid I’m so illiterate with all this that I don’t know how to explain what happened well but I’ll try. I selected Erase disc and Swap to file because I saw Distrotube do that in a video I just watched. I set it to do its thing and at some point I see a small bar in the top left corner of a black screen. I assumed this is when I was suppose to take the USB out, but clearly I did something I wasn’t supposed to. So now I have a computer that can go to the boot section of the bios but it can’t boot into anything. Is there anything I can do to save my computer? Yes I know I’m so dumb, please spare me the reprimands. Appreciate any help I can get!
Hi and welcome
This could itself be an issue as Rufus has decided to intentionally implement bad practices.
It might work OK … but only if you specifically use it in dd mode.
I dont much like the following software either, but if coming from Windoze, then etcher is a pretty reliable GUI image writer.
Absolutely. If it still POSTs, the EFI is working, etc … it is fine.
Something just went wrong during the format stage (I dont know if it was user error or not) of the disk.
You should be able to boot any image that was similarly (but maybe better?) created on a DVD, USB, etc.
So maybe we can start there … what exactly have you tried to boot, and how ?
Wow that was fast! Thanks! I went and got the latest version of Xfce on the Manjaro website. I did use Rufus in DD mode because I saw that it needed that. I also made all the setting match the Rufus settings I saw on their download page. I believe it called for fat32 or something. I don’t have another computer so I may have to use a family’s or friend’s computer if I need it. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that.
Sadly if there is no working media (internal or external) then you may have to rely on one of those friendly peoples machines.
Basically you need an operating system, somehow.
(and it sounds like you may have overwritten your existing one[s])
When you start up the PC, you can either enter BIOS or make a selection from the EFI ‘boot menu’, correct?
What options are present, and what happens after selection ?
I have the options as follows:
Windows Boot Manager
NVMe0: INTEL SSDPEKKF256G8L
USB HDD: ChipsBnk Flash Disk
PXE BOOT
If I select any of the first 3 if flashes for a moment and stays on the same screen. If I select PXE boot it does black for about 10 seconds and returns to that same screen.
OK … PXE is for booting a connected system, like on a network.
The others seem to be your internal/windoze and external/usb …
And it appears they are all wiped or malformed in some way.
You may double-check that you didnt accidentally use traditional mode in the past (non-EFI) and see if making that setting change would allow one of those to boot … but its probably unlikely if you have no recollection of doing anything like that.
You can also furiously tap the Esc key during boot to possibly pull up the GRUB menu.
If that produces something … we might have something to work with.
(an installed linux kernel … just problems booting the GUI … note)
So … if nothing like that helps … then we are probably back at ‘you need a working disk/image’ of some sort …
I guess you dont need a friend … you could have one of those overpriced linux USB’s that are preformatted sent to you. But thats not going to be the most expedient either.
I dont understand much of that but I’ll delve into it. Thank you so much for your help. I will update the page as I learn more. Interestingly enough, clicking esc a ton does bring me to an info page for the computer, and at another point during boot it brought me to the black screen with the original bar I saw before this issue happened. Stay tuned…
Cheers. Sorry for not being able to help more.
Do let us know if there are any developments.
Curious, what are the bad practices? I actually always recommend Rufus for Windoze as I have explored its GitHub repository and it’s by far the best for Windoze IMO. Etcher is actually a no for me. Rufus actually mentioned that Manjaro had bad practice in distributing the ISO image (always in dd flash drive image but not a proper hybrid ISO).
Can you boot into Windows Boot Manager? If not, then I suspect your first attempt on removing the USB flash drive prematurely caused hardware issue that you need to check with the OEM vendor.