Dual boot keep losing grub and falling into grub rescue

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I’ve been having this issue for a few weeks now and not sure what is causing it, only thing I can think of is cmos battery

I’m dual booting windows and manjaro on a dell laptop. When I try and reboot I will boot into grub rescue, I use a live usb to reinstall grub and then the laptop will boot/dual boot fine for a couple of days. After this I then boot into grub rescue again, reinstall grub and dual boot works fine again for a few days.
Its been going on for a few weeks now and getting annoying.

Anything I can check in bios or any advice is appreciated

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I think it’s because Windows or Windows or something updates overwrites or breaks your EUFI or something. Not sure. But I suggest looking here and applying the necessary (no, I don’t know what that would be, as I only have Manjaro installed.):

[root tip] Dual boot Manjaro and Windows - Contributions / Tutorials - Manjaro Linux Forum

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I think you’re onto something, it is very simple to verify that. Replace your CMOS battery it is very cheap fix.

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Thinking two possibilities - but I really don’t know for sure - I am leaning towards the second possibility.

  • an attempt to mix systems ? efi and mbr ?
  • one of the grub efi stubs does not match the grub.cfg

The package install-grub is an attempt to work around such issue?

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5

There was a similar scenario only a few days ago, and the CMOS battery was indeed the culprit.

For the sake of $2 / $5 and potentially saving everyone (and yourself) some wasted time, do as @omano suggests; replace the battery, and then reset your BIOS configuration to your preferred defaults.

If that doesn’t solve it, someone will still be here to help, and you’ll have a spare battery. :wink:

Regards.

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Pro-tip: many people don’t know that, but there is an expiration date on batteries, look carefully on the package, and try to buy a fresh battery (with very long expiration date or with recent manufacturing date if printed). Some places sell old stocks and it is not good, don’t buy that it will bite you again sooner than expected. Something confusing is that sometimes, the date printed on the battery or the package, can be the expiration date OR the manufacturing date, I know this is dumb :smiley: but some have clear labels so aim for this.

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Tbh I’ve been dual booting the same setup for 12 months now. Once a windows update nuked my grub as i didn’t even have grub rescue. Since then I’ve been fine until about 3 weeks ago and now every couple of days i drop I to grub rescue. Figured reinstalling grub from usb would solve it but unfortunately it hasn’t. Got a CMOS battery on prime so will try that 1st tomorrow

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