I was using Manjaro and multitasking, I turned on Minecraft and the entire OS froze. I did not realize “raise the elephant” was a thing at the time and so I held down the power button until the PC turned off. On reboot after the BIOS screen I am greeted with a blinking _ cursor. tty does not work and at that point I reboot it.
I have managed to boot up a bootable USB and using the grub command line I can get it to boot with the following commands:
grub> set root=(hd4,2)
grub> linux /boot/vmlinuz-5.10-x86_64 root=/dev/nvme0n1p2
grub> initrd /boot/initramfs-5.10-x86_64-fallback.img
grub> boot
it is important to note if i use a non failback kernel (initramfs-5.10-x86_64.img) It will hang completely.
I originally thought there was a KERNEL issue and so i uninstalled 5.15. I will go back to it eventually now that I know with either kernel (5.10 or 5.15) it will hang if i do not use the failback.
I had this happen before and I am not sure how I got it to work.
I would like to repair my grub boot. I have tried the directions below: https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php?title=GRUB/Restore_the_GRUB_Bootloader
and I had no luck with them. Please let me know where to go from here. I really appreciate the support for this OS and it upsets me that I can’t get this to work.
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found theme: /usr/share/grub/themes/manjaro/theme.txt
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.10-x86_64
Found initrd image: /boot/amd-ucode.img /boot/initramfs-5.10-x86_64.img
Found initrd fallback image: /boot/initramfs-5.10-x86_64-fallback.img
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.4-x86_64
Found initrd image: /boot/amd-ucode.img /boot/initramfs-5.4-x86_64.img
Found initrd fallback image: /boot/initramfs-5.4-x86_64-fallback.img
Warning: os-prober will be executed to detect other bootable partitions.
Its output will be used to detect bootable binaries on them and create new boot entries.
grub-probe: error: cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/sdc1. Check your device.map.
grub-probe: error: cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/sdc1. Check your device.map.
Found Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS (20.04) on /dev/nvme0n1p4
Found Windows 10 on /dev/sdb1
Found Windows 10 on /dev/sdb2
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+/memtest.bin
/usr/bin/grub-probe: warning: unknown device type nvme0n1.
done
Here is the output of grub-install:
[xxx]# grub-install /dev/nvme0n1
Installing for i386-pc platform.
grub-install: warning: this GPT partition label contains no BIOS Boot Partition; embedding won't be possible.
grub-install: warning: Embedding is not possible. GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists. However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged..
grub-install: error: will not proceed with blocklists.
Please dont mind my disarray of OS installs. I assure you Manjaro is my laptop and desktop daily driver.
I went into gparted and went to make a backup of my FS so that i could prepare to move around partitions to build a EFI drive. when i pressed refresh in gparted the program hung and threw an exit code and closed. On reboot I could not longer see my nvme drive. I opened and reseated the drive on my PC. On reboot it magically worked as intended!!! The drive is failing or failed IMO. It is a Inland nvme drive as well!!!
I am backing up and ordering a new drive as we speak.
Next time before you install anything learn the requirements for UEFI boot on one hand and BIOS (legacy) boot on the other hand. They usually require the right partition scheme. BIOS and gpt can be combined but you need to understand the special BIOS boot partition requirement if you want to use grub to boot. You will easily get in trouble if you mix these techniques. This is all pretty good described in wikipedia, Archlinux wiki and Manjaro wiki but you need to spend some time to get familar with this. A search engine of your choice is your friend.
Thanks Wollie, I am going to go over it now. I was following the guide from red hat to transfer from bios to UEFI but when i went to backup my drives it stopped running.