Odd question, but I bought the same monitor I had like a year back & crazy, but it whacked my bootloader. How can I check if it is still on the drve, without rebooting?
Wow, I’ve never heard of anything like that before. How can you tell that your bootloader is broken without knowing the method you’re asking about here?
Just run: sudo install-grub
If the command isn’t found: sudo pacman -S install-grub
EDIT: That’s not meant to be a criticism - it was just my first thought!
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sudo tree /boot/efi
Will at least show you if the file is there. If it is the correct version…unless you have a filesize or a checksum to compare to, you cannot. If in doubt
sudo install-grub
to reinstall the quick way, provided you have the install-grub package.
p.s. It is impossible for your monitor to have something to do with your bootloader. Those 2 are not mixing 
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Odd timing, yep plugged it in, no grub at boot.
Nowadays some distributions are using different boot-loaders. But if you did the install, you should know it 
As @Teo said, your monitor can’t affect your bootloader.
Did it still boot? If it booted up anyway, then it sounds like the grub menu just didn’t show up for some reason but it’s not broken.
Your first post kind of implies it booted up and now you don’t want to reboot, so how did you boot if the bootloader is messed up?
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Is it actually not booting, or just not displaying on the monitor? Maybe the GRUB screen is set to a resolution the monitor can’t handle? (Unlikely, but possible).
What about booting from a LIve Session to see if it works there …?
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It rebooted, just last year it happened, so odd.
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That is indeed possible. If GRUB_GFXMODE= is set to auto, grub will try to determine the correct resolution by itself, but this doesn’t always work well. On my system for instance, it showed the grub menu at a much lower resolution than the native 1920 x 1080 resolution of both my Intel GPU and my LG monitor, and so I explicitly had to specify the resolution in /etc/default/grub.
And, if grub fails at determining the correct resolution and it comes up with one that’s outside of the monitor’s scope, then it will indeed just leave you with a black screen until the display manager takes over.
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Just a quick check on this machine:
cat /etc/default/grub | grep -i gfx
GRUB_GFXMODE=auto
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep
Yes, I know the rough “grep” but I haven’t had an issue with my current monitor on this machine.
I have, however, had an issue with a previously-connected monitor not displaying an image on one of my machines, which could only be fixed by connecting another one and changing the settings. 
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