The whole grub thing is actually strongly recommended to avoid future problems and not really necessary right now. If you are up to date, your grub should be at 2.12rc and the update bumps it to 2.12 final. There seem not to be any breaking changes…because i honestly forgot to update the first stage and rebooted just fine. And BTW, if you update the grub efi part using chroot/usb live session, make sure to use the 2023-12-23 iso from yesterday, because it is the first to use that version.
Also, to check the grub first stage version, on the grub menu, hit c for command prompt - the version appears at the top. Then hit esc to go back.
Interestingly, that’s not the case with my (just updated) KDE (wayland). What you describe might not be a result of the update, despite the apparent timing.
How come this isn’t mentioned in the devs release information then?
I browsed through the documentation and official announcements and I didn’t find any such recommendation for simply updating to a newer version.
The Arch wiki says:
Warning: Update/reinstall the boot loader (see #UEFI systems or #BIOS systems) if a new GRUB version changes the syntax of the configuration file: mismatching configuration can result in an unbootable system.
The own Manjaro wiki says it’s only necessary if you suffer an “unfinished update”.
Everything I’ve read suggests you just need to make sure the config file gets newly generated, which already happens automatically with the normal update. If something goes wrong with the grub update, the log would say so and inform the user to maybe investigate the problem.
And since the previous version of the package was apparently “2.12rc1” I fail to see how this recommendation applies here anyway. Maybe if you are on a very old version, but then this should be mentioned in the post accordingly.
Personally I updated without any additional intervention.
Edit:// Looks like some additional information was just added to the post which at least explains the concerns.
Had this same GRUB boot failure after updating, had to set boot order in BIOS again to resolve this boot issue here as well and system booted up as normal.
I think it should be noted in the “known issues and solution” post regarding this grub update.
The wording in the announcement is “may need” and “recommended” not obligatory/must. I personally have done it to avoid future problems. At some point pamac will update again the package/second stage and it may be then incompatible with a ver old first stage and the system will not boot. It is probably more important for older installations (mine is from this year).
I guess the process could be automated with pamac hook but for now it is manual.
Is it only me or is anyone else confused a little when i read this now.
Because why should only MBR Users keep GRUB in sync, when the update process both systems: MBR/EFI not update/reinstall, it should be equal for both sides or not?
Maybe there is only a little mistake in that info and it should called like this:
And why only the Advanced users? So the unexperienced users can run into trouble?
After i read this new Edited changes, i have to revert my view and probably was wrong, i though that pamac will update grub… but after reading this, it looks the opposite.
Anyways, i personally will only reinstall it when i run into issue, i don’t see a big improvement, to always manually reinstall Grub all the time now… im using Manjaro above 3 years now and never reinstalled or keep it in sync and don’t had any issues yet.
Doing my updates today including the grub installing. I know that I am MBR and what my device is but when I put the command in I got this error message
sudo grub-install --force --target=i386-pc --recheck --boot-directory=/boot /dev/sdb1
Installing for i386-pc platform.
grub-install: warning: File system `ntfs' doesn't support embedding.
grub-install: error: embedding is not possible, but this is required for cross-disk install.
My boot device is different from where my main Manjaro install is if that is causing an issue (which I am not sure it is or not). Is the error ignorable and did my grub install work properly? If not what can I do to fix it?
EDIT: I restarted and clearly my system is not broken. I would still like assistance though with this issue just so it is not a problem down the road.
I checked both the Arch and Manjaro wikis and my error doesn’t pop up under troubleshooting on the articles about GRUB so I am at a loss.
Accept that you have to somehow learn/understand the differences between BIOS and UEFI mode booting and between a msdos and a gpt parted disk to maintain your OS. There are excellent wiki entries available, e.g. with regard to grub:
Linux is not Windoze. The higher degree of configuration freedom comes with more responsibility. If you refuse to learn these basics then maybe Manjaro and similar distros are not the right choice for you.
I know pretty well the differences between BIOS and UEFI, thanks.
The problem for me in this situation is: a update was released, and need manual intervention from the user. Well, a Linux user need to understand and be capable to solve problems, yes, that’s true.
But, we are talking about Manjaro, not Arch ou Gentoo. A user that choose Manjaro want a upper level of control and freedom compared to a Ubuntu-like system. But, that same user don’t want all the work that Arch or Gentoo have.
With all that said: the problem here is that we need to manually reinstall Grub, but the instructions about it are loose on 3 different links and 67 comments here. Manjaro meant to be friendly, right? So, why not just say something like this:
“If you use UEFI, use this command; if you use BIOS, use that”.
Honestly, I don’t see the point of having Pamac GUI and others great resources that make the use of the OS simple, to make users that aren’t experts suffer when a manual intervention is required. It’s that hard to make it easier?
Don’t get me wrong: but I just want to do the right thing to prevent spend hours recovering or reinstalling the system because my negligence broke the OS.
So, I deleted my previous comment.
I am going straight on this one:
I confirmed that I am using MBR/BIOS. So, looking into the documentation:
BIOS System
On a BIOS/GPT system there is no MBR and therefore no place to store the loader. The GPT partition specification allows for an unformatted partition of the BIOS boot partition type (0xEF02). The size of this partition can be as small as 1 mebibyte. The Calamares installer uses a fixed size of 32 mebibyte. On a BIOS/MBR system a part of the bootloader is written to the Master Boot Record for the primary disk.
Thanks, also Merry Christmas to you. 
