Suddenly GRUB showing on boot with duplicate Manjaro entries

Support
1

Hello everyone.

A few days ago GRUB started showing up on boot for a couple seconds then booting Manjaro. I’ve not seen it before it used to always boot straight into Manjaro. In GRUB there are two entries: “Manjaro Linux” and “Manjaro Linux (on /dev/nvme0n1p2)”. No matter what (if any) I select it boots in the same Manjaro installation, I’ve never installed a second one anyway.

I don’t know exactly when it started and thus what I did before. I had some issues with Chromium though which freezes everything and turns everything black. I don’t think this is a related issue but it forced me to hard reset the PC and I can neither confirm nor deny that this started it.

I did some research and saw that /etc/default/grub can be edited to hide it on start. However I saw that in there GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE is already set to “hidden”. GRUB_TIMEOUT was set to “5”, I’ve changed it to “0” just to test and ran sudo update-grub. It just changed the timeout to 10 seconds and I reverted it.

I feel like this is slowing down my boot unnecessarily and would like to hide it again but I found no way to do so. I did see s/o mentioning setting the timeout to “0.0” but others commented it was weird so I rather stayed away from it. I’m pretty new and really don’t want to break anything.

Thank you in advance.

2

Just to be sure about the current active options set in your /etc/default/grub

grep -v ^# /etc/default/grub

This ist what mine looks like: 
GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR='Manjaro'
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT='mitigations=off quiet udev.log_priority=3 audit=0'
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

GRUB_PRELOAD_MODULES="part_gpt part_msdos"


GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden

GRUB_TERMINAL_INPUT=console


GRUB_GFXMODE=auto

GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep


GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY=true

GRUB_COLOR_NORMAL="light-gray/black"
GRUB_COLOR_HIGHLIGHT="green/black"

GRUB_THEME="/usr/share/grub/themes/manjaro/theme.txt"


GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true

I did alter the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line - but that is not important here.

I have seen threads with descriptions that look similar to yours.

Reinstalling grub was suggested and might be the solution.

sudo pacman -Syu install-grub
sudo install-grub
3

Thank you for your reply. Here is my output:

GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR='Manjaro'
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT='quiet splash udev.log_priority=3'
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

GRUB_PRELOAD_MODULES="part_gpt part_msdos"


GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden

GRUB_TERMINAL_INPUT=console


GRUB_GFXMODE=auto

GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep


GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY=true

GRUB_COLOR_NORMAL="light-gray/black"
GRUB_COLOR_HIGHLIGHT="green/black"

GRUB_THEME="/usr/share/grub/themes/manjaro/theme.txt"


GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=false


GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false

Reinstalling GRUB sounds… exciting. The holding-my-breath-while-booting kind of exciting. I’ll let you review the output above first if that’s okay. :see_no_evil_monkey:

4

It was just for you to compare my pretty much unaltered file with what you have.

One thing I saw:

You have
GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false
active

This means:
it is NOT disabled - it is enabled

read the explanatory comments above each option:

The following is the default setting.

# Uncomment this option to enable os-prober execution in the grub-mkconfig command
#GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false

comment that option again if you are not dual booting

Research what install-grub does - nothing exiting.

Here is one thread with an example of what it does:

Totally broken system after December 2025 Stable Update - #82 by Nachlese

essentially this:
sudo cp /boot/efi/EFI/Manjaro/grubx64.efi /boot/efi/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi

2 Likes
5

Running install-grub is non-intrusive operation - it is Manjaro specific helper script designed to ensure compatibility between the manjaro loader and the grub efi default loader when reading the /boot/grub/grub.cfg - it also checks if your currently booted efi entry is manjaro.

If you don’t dual-boot with windows - comment the line `GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false’ - already suggested.

1 Like
6

My bad, I misinterpreted you there. Unlikely I would’ve picked up the uncommented line though so thank you for pointing that out. This was indeed the solution, commenting it out resulted in a boot without grub showing up. No clue how that happened, I have never touched that before and even after grub was showing, I have not messed with that particular line.

The explanatory comments sometimes don’t really explain a lot to me. And given that I have not touched this line myself at all I would’ve assumed everything is in order had I read it. Probably again my bad. On that note: Any educated guesses as to how this can happen? Something must’ve caused the change, right?

Thanks a lot for your time and support. Glad this was such an easy fix. =)

Many thanks to you as well. I do have my old Windows on another SSD but I just change the boot device in the UEFI in the rare case I need to boot into Windows so grub shouldn’t have anything to do with it.

7

I think (!) that this was the default once, but it got changed to be disabled by default some time ago.
Not sure - can’t remember.
If that happened, you should have (had) a .pacnew file - or perhaps still have it.

8

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