Cannot boot; UEFI won't find drive, but it mounts from live system

My UEFI won’t find Manjaro (cannot boot) from internal SSD,
but both drives work in a live system from USB.

not a duplicate of ...

Don’t confuse this with Drive not shown as bootable by motherboard, works on live USB

tl;dr: Detect EFI bootloaders on live USB works, but the motherboard doesn’t recognise the drive as bootable.

  • That question asks about the UEFI not finding a “bootable” drive
  • My drive does not show up at all

Setup

  • Older ASUS RoG laptop
  • One SSD (Manjaro GNOME with LUKS FDE as ext4)
  • One HDD (no OS, just data as ext4)
  • Intel i7 7th gen CPU (7700HQ)
  • Running (when booted) Linux 5.15.38-1-MANJARO
sudo inxi -MD output
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: ASUSTeK product: GL702VMK v: 1.0
    serial: ...
  Mobo: ASUSTeK model: GL702VMK v: 1.0 serial: ...
    UEFI: American Megatrends v: GL702VMK.305 date: .../2019
Drives:
  ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Micron model: ... size: 238.47 GiB
  ID-2: /dev/sdb vendor: Seagate model: ... size: 931.51 GiB
  ID-3: /dev/sdc type: USB model: USB DISK 3.0 size: 57.69 GiB

Problem

  • Worked for years with GNOME edition, no changes made in UEFI
  • UEFI only detects my HDD, cannot see SSD in UEFI settings
  • The Manjaro live image works from a USB stick
  • I can read both drives from there just fine
  • Manjaro live menu (grub, I believe) detects “EFI Bootloaders”
    • My SSD is among them
    • “boots”; asks me for my passphrase
    • Cannot enter my LUKS FDE passphrase

Occurrences

  • First time was two days ago, “just rebooting” worked
  • Yesterday same problem, three reboots later didn’t work
  • Today (while writing this from my desktop) it worked again after several attempts

Questions

  • What could be the cause for my SSD often not being found by my UEFI?
  • What additional info do you need?
  • How do I fix this (prevent it in the future)?

TL;DR

  • My SSD often just does not show up in my laptops UEFI
  • This is “random”, does not always happen; for the first time two days ago, never before
  • Drives can mount & work from live USB stick

This may be relevant: Drive not shown as bootable by motherboard, works on live USB - #2 by stephane

Thanks in advance for your time

1 - check if any update UEFI motherboard
2 - can you provide ( from USB live manjaro iso or if you can boot on your disk , precise choice done)

inxi -MDpza
sudo parted -l

3 - all disks are in AHCI in your UEFI Motherboard ?

there is a partition EFI on USB live manjaro to boot on USB UEFI ( can differ with choice / option on yours disks & others option in your UEFI Motherboard )

Thanks for your help!


How do I do that? Manufacturer website?
Is there anything to look out for?
Are there tools that do this automatically/are they good/safe?

inxi -MDpza
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: ASUSTeK product: GL702VMK v: 1.0 serial: <filter>
  Mobo: ASUSTeK model: GL702VMK v: 1.0 serial: <filter>
    UEFI: American Megatrends v: GL702VMK.305 date: 04/19/2019
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 1.14 TiB used: 751.79 GiB (64.3%)
  ID-1: /dev/sda maj-min: 8:0 vendor: Micron model: 1100 MTFDDAV256TBN
    family: Micron Client SSDs size: 238.47 GiB block-size: physical: 512 B
    logical: 512 B sata: 3.2 speed: 6.0 Gb/s type: SSD serial: <filter>
    rev: A020 temp: 37 C scheme: GPT
  SMART: yes state: enabled health: PASSED on: 28d 22h cycles: 1845
    written: 16.2 TiB Old-Age: UDMA CRC errors: 60
  ID-2: /dev/sdb maj-min: 8:16 vendor: Seagate model: ST1000LM035-1RK172
    family: Mobile HDD size: 931.51 GiB block-size: physical: 4096 B
    logical: 512 B sata: 3.1 speed: 6.0 Gb/s type: HDD rpm: 5400
    serial: <filter> rev: SDM1 temp: 28 C scheme: GPT
  SMART: yes state: enabled health: PASSED on: 173d 23h cycles: 1827
    read: 6.03 TiB written: 7.15 TiB Old-Age: g-sense error rate: 639 Pre-Fail:
    reallocated sector: 99 threshold: 36 attribute: Spin_Retry_Count
    value: 100 worst: 100 threshold: 97
Partition:
  ID-1: / raw-size: 221.01 GiB size: 216.49 GiB (97.95%)
    used: 182.86 GiB (84.5%) fs: ext4 block-size: 4096 B dev: /dev/dm-0
    maj-min: 254:0 mapped: luks-860e8453-aa9b-4e4f-aeab-fa93e85fffd8
  ID-2: /boot/efi raw-size: 300 MiB size: 299.4 MiB (99.80%)
    used: 424 KiB (0.1%) fs: vfat block-size: 512 B dev: /dev/sda1 maj-min: 8:1
  ID-3: /mnt/ldata raw-size: 631.51 GiB size: 620.53 GiB (98.26%)
    used: 568.93 GiB (91.7%) fs: ext4 block-size: 4096 B dev: /dev/sdb1
    maj-min: 8:17
  ID-4: swap-1 size: 17.15 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) fs: swap
    swappiness: 60 (default) cache-pressure: 100 (default) priority: -2
    dev: /dev/dm-1 maj-min: 254:1
    mapped: luks-32104485-2a83-4c10-a985-072cd9855f07
sudo parted -l
Model: ATA Micron_1100_MTFD (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 256GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End    Size    File system  Name  Flags
 1      2097kB  317MB  315MB   fat32              boot, esp
 2      317MB   238GB  237GB
 3      238GB   256GB  18,4GB


Model: ATA ST1000LM035-1RK1 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size   File system  Name   Flags
 1      1049kB  678GB   678GB  ext4         ldata
 2      678GB   1000GB  322GB  ntfs                msftdata

Sorry, but what does that mean?


Update:

  • After the “lucky” successful boot, I ran sudo pacman -Syu
  • This ended up running some post-transaction hooks
  • Two successive reboots (for testing) were successful

But still

  • Why did this happen?
  • Is there any/a good chance the post-transaction hooks fixed the issue?
  • If someone else (reading this thread) runs into the same problem; how would they fix it?
  • Is this issue likely to return?

1 - on this link
*** be very careful , bios for GL702VM , THEN select model GL702VMK***

https://icr-emea.asus.com/webchat/icr.html?rootTreeId=EMEA.ACF.FR-FR&treeId=EMEA.ACF.FR-FR.Notebook&tenantId=FR-FR&language=en-us
lastest version 305 → ok

2 - you have a boot/efi on sda1( your disk ) with flag boot&esp → OK

3 - that mean , all disks are recognized by linux with AHCI option , not
fast boot or any raid option that windows used.

4 - maybe a interruption process ( shutdown or error like full disk for example ) that do not apply full update

in this case always
a- remove any lock , if present
b - redo update mirrors and update , if yo ucan boot on your disk

sudo pacman-mirrors -c all
sudo pacman -Syyu

c - if you cant boot on your disk , use USB live iso manjaro , do chroot and finish the update

5 - have you checked the log journal ?

sudo journalctl -b n -p 4 ( n=0 current boot , n=-1 boot before , n=-2 , etc... )

Here’s another idea - I just messed about with mine until I lost windows, then I installed rEFInd - when I searched, I found this:

3 community/manjaro-refind-installer 0.2-6 [0B 6.11KiB] [Installed]
    Manjaro rEFInd GUI installer

Installed it and rebooted - bingo.
Looks nicer, slicker and seems to work flawlessly - on reboot it presents two big icons to click and a gear icon to boot to BIOS.

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