Updating Linux Mint messed up my Linux Manjaro Grub 2

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1

I just the other day decided up upgrade my Mint from 21.2 (Victoria) to 21.3 (Virginia). First I installed several updates for 21.2 packages and then updated to 21.3.

In my computer I have 5 sshds. Each with a different OS. I have Mint, Manjaro, Ubuntu. Windows 7 and Windows 10. While Mint boots up as the default drive, if I want to pick another OS I just hit F12 at boot and pick another drive.

Some are UEFI and some are not.

Grub2 on my Mint allows me also to boot Ubuntu but has never included Manjaro probably because it was installed later. The Grub2 on my Manjaro listed I think either just itself or itself and Ubuntu.

After upgrading to Mint 21.3 when I tried to boot Manjaro I found that I would get the regular Grub options screen that I would see when booting Mint which only includes Mint and Ubuntu. If I disable all of the other disks but the Manjaro one in the BIOS setup I would get to a Grub command prompt.

I looked around at Grub but not being an expert in Grub I did not get much of anything done with it. If I boot up Mint I can as SU see the files on the Manjaro drive and mess with them. I looked at the grub.cfg on that drive and it does mention Mint, Manjaro & Ubuntu but the one on the Mint drive does not mention Manjaro.

I have timeshift snapshots for all of my linux Oss and was wondering if I could just restore the Manjaro to its drive using the Timshift on Mint.

Thanks

Mod note: Edited to improve readability. :wink:

2

This is likely the root problem.

Each OS should boot as either UEFI or Legacy. Having a mixture of technologies such as you indicate will invariable allow issues such as this to raise their ugly heads.

As you already have each OS on a separate disk this makes my following suggestions more achievable:

You could reinstall any Legacy booting OS as UEFI, or (where possible) convert them to UEFI with a GPT partitioning scheme.

With each OS then booting as UEFI you will be able to use rEFInd as the default UEFI Bootloader. Each Grub2 instance would continue to be managed and updated by each respective OS, but rEFInd would become the initial boot loader which will then detect each instance of Grub2 UEFI boot files or the Microsoft UEFI boot files.

The result is that rEFInd effectively chainloads every OS in your system. Plus, rEFInd allows to bypass Grub2 and boot the Kernel stub directly, if desired.

The usual question about now might be “Is there a guide for all this?”. There are none that I know of, but no doubt there are many for the individual steps you would need to take.

These procedures would take much research on your part, but the result would help you avoid the pitfalls of multiple Grub instances and working with incompatible boot technologies.

Regards.

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