My computer encountered an error during an update and now it doesn't boot anything at all

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Hello, I hope this is the right place to ask my question. I’m not sure if this problem is Manjaro-related, and if I’m in the wrong forum, I apologize.

Last year I bought a brand new laptop, with an i913th processor. I’ve read everywhere in recent days that i913ths are sometimes defective, and the fact that for a few weeks now my pc has been experiencing intermittent crashes has prompted me to update the firmware (but I don’t know if it’s the processor’s fault, I did it for safety). To do this, I first updated the system (with pacman) and everything went smoothly as usual. Then I ran fwupd following the instructions given, the program didn’t seem to indicate any problems so far. When I typed the last sudo fwupdmgr update command, it finally threw the following error:

Cannot run update: failed to write data to efivarfs: Error writing to file descriptor: No space left on device

I found a similar case of this error here, but it didn’t solve my problem (and the OP still manages to boot).

My problem is now as follows: Manjaro no longer boots, either from the BIOS or from a live usb. No error is indicated, only a black screen after the manufacturer’s logo.

I’ve tried to boot an earlier version of Manjaro that the system had kept on my PC, I’ve also tried to live boot another distribution (ubuntu) on usb, but nothing at all boots. I can’t even give an error message…

Concerning the BIOS, it’s an insydeh20. This isn’t the first time I’ve booted a Linux, I’ve disabled secure boot, I’ve disabled fast boot, I’ve selected the usual options and I’ve also tried resetting the BIOS to initial configuration.

I’m very surprised that even a live usb boot doesn’t work, and this is really starting to worry me because otherwise I won’t even be able to recover my precious files.

Is my only option to go and ask the manufacturer to change my motherboard? Or are there other things I can do?

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This unfortunately does sound like a bad BIOS flash. I was fortunate when this happened to me that no only had I successfully backed up the original BIOS but a good mate had the necessary programmer interface to re-flash it.

You might be able to re-flash it with a USB image, or something, using a special key-combination on power-up. Last time I did that it was via a floppy disk!

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I see 2 options what you can do.

Since i don’t know what you are using, it could be Legacy Boot (CSL) needs to activated/disabled depends on your prior settings.

Do you see your Bootdevices in your Bios? Maybe worth it to press F12 Key while you booting to check the Bootmanager, what devices are there to boot from.

Another option is to reflash your Bios to your old version… normally the bios asked to backup your old bios version before you overwrite it.

If you didn’t saved it, ask your Vendor for another/older version.

Sometimes TPM (Trusted Platform Module) sucks too, if you don’t rely on that… disable this junk.

If you talking about the big Media reports about Intel 13/14th CPU Gen problems… i think this issues are mainly related to PC CPU’s (but im not sure if Intels CPU Laptop’s could had related problems too).

Because there is a big gap when we look at Laptop Hardware that is total different, even when the labels looks identical.

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It could be many things, but start with the error message. It tells you nvram is full. Enter bios, choose reset to factory reset and that will clear nvram. Then start making settings like disabling secure boot, adding bootloaders following the grub reinstall procedure in wiki.

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Thanks for your replie,

I’ve never heard of a BIOS re-flash… I’ll go and read up on the subject.

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Thank you very much for your reply.

I’ve looked at this in the BIOS, but this option doesn’t appear anywhere (or equivalent, apparently).

I think my BIOS has a bootdevice (because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to install Manjaro from a bootable usb key, would I?) Anyway, I pressed F12 but nothing happened.

Unfortunately, that seems to be where I’m headed…

Indeed, I tried it with and without this option, but unfortunately it had no visible effect.

You’re probably right, I should have been more careful when making this update. That said, I would never have imagined that even the BIOS would no longer allow booting. At least now I know.

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Thank you for your reply.

My BIOS doesn’t seem to have a complete reset as it was when it left the factory. Instead, each menu offers to reset the options to the original ones, which seemed to me to be the “most equivalent” (but it doesn’t change the micro-code for all that, a priori). So I couldn’t reset it, or I don’t know how to do it with this BIOS.

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Hello ! I’ve finally got some help from my reseller to reflash my BIOS and take advantage of it to do some updates, everything’s back to normal now.

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