Grub error after BIOS update

Yesterday I did an BIOS update and after disabling fastboot and secureboot again, I was greeted with following error

Grub boot error: … grub_cli_set_auth_needed…

So the fix was: booting into a live usb stick and repair grub. → System runs fine again.

So now I am curious why does this happen? In my limited mind I think: Why can an Bios Update impact my grub installation, if it is normally possible to just stick my SSD into another PC and boot my Linux install?

Or could it be a problem with the fallback like describted here: [Unstable Update] July 2025 - #31 by linux-aarhus

Can someone please enlighten me :grin:

That is possible

When you update your firmware you may lose the efi boot entries.

When that happen - the system scans for the EFI partitions and use the first it find.

It then pick the efi stub at $esp/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi`

This location is only updated when the user choose to do so and may not match the grub.cfg.

This is the reason @philm created a script install-grub which updates the default efi stub to match the one located in $esp/EFI/Manjaro/grubx64.efi.

The script was recently updated to check if the firmware contained a Manjaro boot entry - and create an entry if it does not exist.

I have the install-grub package installed which implements the pacman hook on installing new grub versions.

Does this mean I just was unfortunate and had a bad timing with the bios update?

So in future with the updated script the problem should not occur?

There is never a guarantee

  • only the best intentions
  • thousands of hardware combinations…
  • thousands of users…

:slight_smile:

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