Grub refuses to show up, after installing refind

[EddieA6987]

I have windows on one SSD and Manjaor on another, plus some additional SSDs for storage.
Initially everything was fine, I had installed Ubuntu and I was able to dual boot just fine. Then i decided I didnt want that and went for Manjaro. And still everything was fine. At some point , trying to debug graphics card issues, I did a clean install of Manjaro and forgot to set the bootloader location and it just chose one of my SSDs.
Then no more grub. I tried a lot of steps but it just was not recognizing windows being anywhere and kept assigning some random drive as having windows .
So i clean installed both windows and Manjaro and no grub anymore, i just tried this refind bootloader and nothing, system just boots into linux. Yes windows is there and it works fine. I have done the grub-update among other commands that do not return anything or have no effect. I have played with boot order in my bios to see if maybe it was on another drive and the only thing that happens is I either boot into linux or windows or nothing…but never a grub menu.

here is some info:

Model: ATA Samsung SSD 870 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 2000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name                          Flags
 1      1049kB  106MB   105MB   fat32        EFI system partition          boot, esp
 2      106MB   123MB   16.8MB               Microsoft reserved partition  msftres
 3      123MB   2000GB  2000GB  ntfs         Basic data partition          msftdata


Model: ATA SanDisk SDSSDH3 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 512GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End    Size   Type     File system  Flags
 1      1049kB  512GB  512GB  primary  ext4         boot


Model: ATA SanDisk SDSSDA12 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 120GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End    Size   Type     File system  Flags
 1      1049kB  120GB  120GB  primary  ntfs


Model: ATA SAMSUNG SSD 830 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdd: 128GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name                          Flags
 1      17.4kB  16.8MB  16.8MB               Microsoft reserved partition  msftres
 2      16.8MB  128GB   128GB   ntfs         Basic data partition          msftdata


Model: ATA WDC WD5000AAKX-7 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sde: 500GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start  End  Size  Type  File system  Flags


Model: Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 2TB (nvme)
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 2000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name                          Flags
 1      17.4kB  16.8MB  16.8MB               Microsoft reserved partition  msftres
 2      16.8MB  2000GB  2000GB  ntfs         Basic data partition          msftdata


EFI variables are not supported on this system.

[EddieA6987]

I mentioned that I installed refind. What I did not realize was that refind seems to “hi-jack” windows boot manager , at least in my case. Because after hours of booting into linux to solve my issues, I finally booted my windows from bios and refind popped up letting me chose which OS to boot. I am not sure if this is the intended behavior but I just assumed it worked in conjunction with linux and I would have linux as my priority boot. But now that I know it is on windows I have windows as my priority boot and refind pops up and im good to go.