GRUB update: grub-install hangs in loop

[Acor]

In most cases, grub-install worked on my Dell Inspiron with dual boot. However, it failed twice in the past few months.

The program then doesn’t close, and the desktop becomes unusable. Ctrl-C doesn’t help either. Restarting the computer will cause Windows 11 to start.

Booting into a live system and running grub-install after manjaro-chroot repaires the GRUB boot manager.

I have found indications that updating of the boot entry in the UEFI setup during grub-install may occasionally fail.

1. Does this only affect the pointer to /boot/efi/EFI/Manjaro/grubx64.efi, which should remain unchanged?

2. Is it not safe to use the --no-nvram parameter with grub-install?

3. Would manually creating a boot entry in the UEFI setup by selecting EFI/Manjaro/grubx64.efi be equivalent to the effort of booting with a live system (and chroot, grub-install)?

[Aragorn]

@Acor

In most cases, grub-install worked on my Dell Inspiron with dual boot. However, it failed twice in the past few months.

The program then doesn’t close, and the desktop becomes unusable. Ctrl-C doesn’t help either. Restarting the computer will cause Windows 11 to start.

This suggests that your /boot/efi/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi might be missing or has been overwritten with — in your case — the MS-Windows boot entry. Windows is known to do this sort of thing during a Windows update, and without telling you about it.

@Acor

I have found indications that updating of the boot entry in the UEFI setup during grub-install may occasionally fail.

1. Does this only affect the pointer to /boot/efi/EFI/Manjaro/grubx64.efi, which should remain unchanged?

grub-install normally only updates that entry, unless the --removable option is specified, in which case it also updates /boot/efi/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi.

The script install-grub — which may or may not be installed on your system, but it’s available from the Manjaro repository — was created specifically so as to make sure that /boot/efi/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi and /boot/efi/EFI/manjaro/grubx64.efi are identical. If they are not, then this could lead to all kinds of problems regarding reinstalling or updating the boot loader.

@Acor

• Is it not safe to use the --no-nvram parameter with grub-install?

It is generally advised to not use that option.

@Acor

Would manually creating a boot entry in the UEFI setup by selecting EFI/Manjaro/grubx64.efi be equivalent to the effort of booting with a live system (and chroot, grub-install)?

In theory, yes. But I would recommend simply installing and running install-grub, which was designed to handle this transparently.

[Acor]

That will help in the future, I guess.

I installed install-grub package and glanced in the bash script with same name.

The script install-grub is called without any parameter and is run regardless of a given --help parameter. After some checks it constructs the parameters for grub-install and calls it and then grub-mkconfig as well. Before calling grub-install it checks if there is a menu item for Manjaro (GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR in /etc/default/grub) in the UEFI setup (using efibootmgr) and if there is already a menu item it calls grub-install with the needed parameters plus --no-nvram and --force.