Well hang on before I pin that medal on you, because this is going to be a gold lol.
I installed mtools in the chroot environment and I see the EFI partition there if I launch gparted from within chroot environment.
Its already flagged as ‘boot’ and ‘esp’.
Now what?
Well, you could boot from it, so apparently it works, no? 
I haven’t tried that yet. Still in the live USB instance.
But I did launch gparted and then ran the install in the chroot environment, and the “!” is gone next to the EFI partition.
Should I do anything else, or just reboot?
Or am I supposed to go back and do all the steps here:
I think it should work now…
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well I’ll try rebooting.
But. Experience has not made me optimistic on this one lol
Nope same thing.
If I boot Manjaro, it brings up a grub menu with “UEFI Firmware Settings” as the only option. If I pick that, the PC shuts off
Its weird because all the files are there. I can get to a grub prompt and list and see all the filesystems
It is weird indeed. Well, maybe someone else can pitch in now, because I’m out of ideas and it’s closing in on 02:00 in the morning over here, so I’m going to offline for the night… 
What about the other steps in your solution? I hadn’t done any of them. Or did they not apply here
Yeah it looks like the updates didn’t take on the actual PC.
When I rebooted the EFI partition is in error again.
How to reinstall those packages (mtools, dosfstools) on the actual PC, not the live USB instance?
Maybe I can drop to a # prompt off the grub menu?
Well, your EFI partition appears to be there, so there’s no need to recreate it or add it to /etc/fstab. You could try reinstalling GRUB… 
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=manjaro --recheck
But to be honest, we’ve been down this path before, and I don’t think adding those two packages will make a difference. 
But didn’t you run those inside the chroot?
Inside the chroot window…
pacman -S mtools dosfstools
No, the kernel’s not even loaded at that point. GRUB does have an interactive shell, but it only understands a minimum of commands.
If I reinstall Manjaro off the liveUSB, will I lose all the programs I’ve installed since the previous installation? And will it wipe out say extra programs in /usr/bin and the like.
Surely that would fix the problem. That’s been proven, since the live USB instance works fine. I’m just trying to determine what will be lost by reinstall
Yes, I’m afraid so.
If you format the partition, then yes. But it’s been so long since I installed Manjaro that I don’t even know whether it offers you the option of installing without formatting. This was a new computer anyway, and I’ve never had to reinstall since I first installed it in 2019.
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=manjaro --recheck
This is worth trying again, because the last time it was executed, the EFI filesystem wasn’t there. Now it is, right.
I’m back where brahma was with:
mkinitcpio -P && update-grub
Everything else worked this time.
Because now the EFI filesystem is recognized. However I still get:
==> ERROR: No presets found in /etc/mkinitcpio.d
I’m tempted to reboot. Or will I lose everything done?
I ran update-grub by itself. It says ‘done’.
Except for “Error: mkdir: /var/lock/dmraid”
I hate to reboot until I know for sure, because I imagine everything will have to be done all over again
OK I’m farther than ever before!
I now see Manjaro as an option off the grub menu.
However when I select it, it starts to boot Manjaro. Then I get scrolling:
[FAILED] Failed to start OpenVPN service for Server
[FAILED] Failed to start OpenVPN service for Server
[FAILED] Failed to start OpenVPN service for Server
[FAILED] Failed to start OpenVPN service for Server
[FAILED] Failed to start OpenVPN service for Server
[FAILED] Failed to start OpenVPN service for Server
[FAILED] Failed to start Samba NMB Daemon.
It then hangs there and goes no further.
Are these services even necessary? I’m not networked at all on the PC other than accessing the internet.
Why does it require OpenVPN service to even boot, and will go no further? I don’t even want or need this service. Why can’t it be disabled.
Well I updated it using these commands.
Quoth: “The service files changed. The new release requires server.conf to be under /etc/openvpn/server now.”
So I moved them, exactly as was said.
https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=12100
Now it just hangs forever loading Manjaro
Why in the world is openvpn service so important?
Why can’t I just remove the blinging thing. I’m not even a server! I don’t want to be.
And I was just thinking, “What I need is to spend 3 or 4 days just trying to get the computer to work like it always has!”
Yeah that’s making progress in life. Hooray.
Per this article:
What if I were to boot off the live USB, then copy/backup these directories off the hard disk recursively, to a Passport drive:
usr
bin
opt
Then reinstall Manjaro off the live USB. Then copy/overwrite these directories back to the new system?
Everything else is in the separate /home filesystem already.
Would that not then just reinstall the system, and leave you with everything loaded still intact? Why would that not work?
post output from:
mkinitcpio -P && update-grub
you just keep messing your system up more and more…
OKAY 
Here’s what I did:
I did a reinstall of Manjaro off the liveUSB, replacing the root filesystem, and leaving the rest of them intact.
It was risky… but with the ship already sunk, why not.
This repaired the installation, and now it BOOTS woohoo!!!
It also fixed the grub menu.
I lost all my docking bar shortcuts… but it kept the desktop ones.
And likely the programs. BUT. Will carry on.
I think we can label this closed. What a week. Thanks folks!
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