Manjaro EFI partition formated after BIOS update

[Zesty]

I have a long-standing dual boot windows/manjaro pc and after a bios update I noticed it was skipping grub on boot. I went to do the usual grub restore but realized that an /boot/efi drive no longer exists and that the update completely formatted what I believe to be manjaro’s efi partition:

> Device          Start        End    Sectors   Size Type
> /dev/sdb1        2048    1023999    1021952   499M Windows recovery environment
> /dev/sdb2     1024000    1228799     204800   100M EFI System
> /dev/sdb3     1228800    1261567      32768    16M Microsoft reserved
> /dev/sdb4     1261568 1751336936 1750075369 834.5G Microsoft basic data
> /dev/sdb5  1751336960 1752440831    1103872   539M Windows recovery environment
> /dev/sdb6  1752442880 1953523711  201080832  95.9G Linux filesystem

The partition in question should be between sdb5 and sdb6. Gparted shows it as 1.00Mib unallocated space.

Not many solutions online seem to address a formatted partition. Is there any way of recovering this or recreating it?

[Twifty]

It’s highly unlikely a BIOS update would resize/reformat/merge your partitions. 1Mib is far too small to be an unformatted EFI partition. It’s more likely your the letter assignments have been changed, as in sdbX. You have an EFI partition at /dev/sdb2.

[linux-aarhus]

What happens with some firmware updates - is the registered efi entries are reset to defaults.

When this happens it is often due to the firmware update is done using update software which only works on MS Windows.

Of course it can happen with any firmware updates - especially when the firmware update requires the entire firmware to be reset to defaults.

You can - probably - recover using a Live LInux ISO - booted as EFI - then use efibootmgr to reinstall the entry.

It is also possible to use grub-install to restore the loader - but that will require the usage of a Manjaro Live ISO.

Incidents like this is why my general recommendation is to use a separate EFI partition for your Manjaro installation.

[Zesty]

I had a look around for more details on the efibootmgr command and found this from another post:

sudo manjaro-chroot -a ( type 1 if only one line 0 )
efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sdxy -p 1 -L "Manjaro" -l "\EFI\Manjaro\grubx64.efi"
efibootmgr -v
exit ( for end chroot )

Followed the Manjaro GRUB/Restore steps after that, switched my BIOS load order, removed CSM, and updated grub to display both windows and manjaro in the grub menu.

I thought my manjaro had its own separate efi partition before the bios update - since everywhere states that a fat32 should be before manjaro’s ext4 - but I guess not. It’s all working properly now. Thanks for the help!

[omano]

Every time I update my BIOS, I have to reinstall GRUB from live USB with manjaro-chroot, after that I can boot to GRUB and load Manjaro, or else I have a black screen with “GRUB calloc error” or something like that if I boot to the disk, and also Manjaro doesn’t appear as boot option in BIOS. Don’t know if this is intended but for sure it is reproducible.