From the very beginning where I messed up my grub: I added apparmor=1 and security=apparmor to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub trying to get AppArmor to work; I no longer care about it and got rid of it. Then I ran:
sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
This caused me to get a black screen on boot with a blinking cursor that never progressed even after 10+ min (keyboard completely unresponsive) after multiple hard reboots.
I then plugged in my liveUSB for Manjaro thinking I could mount my original partition, chroot into it, edit the /etc/default/grub to remove my bad parameters, and then run grub-mkconfig again. I had initially tried to just mount /dev/sda1 for this process but I would get an error everytime I ran grub-mkconfig saying the device wasn’t there (sorry I forgot the exact error). I got grub-mkconfig to run after mounting my /dev/sda1 along with /boot /proc /dev /sys but it didn’t seem to take when I tried to boot back into my original installation.
At that point I followed the Manjaro boot repair instructions and input the following in terminal after booting the liveUSB again.
sudo manjaro-chroot -a
grub-install /dev/sda1
My original Manjaro partition is on /dev/sda1 with swap on /dev/sda2
I then received the error in my original post. I tried googling to see why I would be getting this error in the first place if I didn’t have an EFI on my initial installation but didn’t find much info other than how to simply fix the error.
Then I started Gparted and resized my swap partition from 17.1 GB to 16.1 GB and created the 1 GB EFI partition with fat32 format. I wanted to do this reallocation with my main partition instead but Gparted would not let me resize it. I then entered grub-install again and it ran successfully. I then ran update-grub, rebooted, and got an error saying the hibernation device wasn’t available and a timeout on the swap device, which led to a long boot time that eventually booted to the desktop. Once at the desktop I opened a terminal and ran:
sudo blkid
subl /etc/fstab
and changed the UUID for swap to the current one found with blkid. This got rid of the errors on boot and the long boot time.
inxi -Dazy output:
Drives:
Local Storage: total: 953.87 GiB used: 133.61 GiB (14.0%)
SMART Message: Required tool smartctl not installed. Check --recommends
ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: A-Data model: SP610 size: 953.87 GiB block size:
physical: 512 B logical: 512 B speed: 6.0 Gb/s serial: rev: 5B
scheme: MBR
sudo blkid output:
/dev/sda1: UUID=“d04ac1c5-8fe7-4764-ad13-56e1fe0142aa” BLOCK_SIZE=“4096” TYPE=“ext4” PARTUUID=“fd48f9a4-01”
/dev/sda2: UUID=“014A-B468” BLOCK_SIZE=“512” TYPE=“vfat” PARTUUID=“fd48f9a4-02”
/dev/sda3: UUID=“c479dd99-2333-43df-a007-d36fa2f75d02” TYPE=“swap” PARTUUID=“fd48f9a4-03”
/etc/fstab output (sorry for the butchered formatting):
<file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
UUID=d04ac1c5-8fe7-4764-ad13-56e1fe0142aa / ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1
UUID=c479dd99-2333-43df-a007-d36fa2f75d02 swap swap defaults,noatime 0 2
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
