Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today I have the story about how I almost lost my main computer. Let’s get started.
The Fall
Thankfully, I rarely need my reset button. Most of the time it gets hit by accident. EndeavourOS has been a good daily driver, but my system recently bombed hard – a crash I have never seen before and hope to never see again. Resetting wasn’t enough.
My main workstation uses systemd-boot, GRUB’s little cousin among boot loaders. Its job is to load an operating system when called, and it wasn’t responding. I poked around. My old, unupdated installation of Manjaro managed to load, but it wasn’t consistent. For some reason, EndeavourOS only appeared bootable in Legacy BIOS mode – even though it would hang at systemd-boot because it is UEFI only. I eventually ran out of combinations to try and loaded an alternate BIOS ROM. You know it’s a bad day when BIOS beeps thrice over a minute and hangs.
Clearing CMOS
At this point, I was outside my repair experience, but when I asked my father for help, he recalled a trick an IT guy pulled at his work to clear an unapproved BIOS lockout password. The motherboard has a jumper for clearing CMOS. Think of it like a factory reset. We found the user’s manual and followed its instructions, restoring the original ROM.
Failed boots eat a ton of time, but at one point I loaded Windows when Manjaro’s GRUB installation apparently failed completely. I searched for my GRUB disk and had to make a new one. When I did, it could only boot Manjaro in any configuration. I tried swapping SATA cables around, but that only made Windows vanish. Last I looked, its drive was zero bits in size.
Repairing my Boot Loaders
Even a jank boot method is better than nothing. Trouble is that Manjaro was horribly out of date, and needed a manual intervention. I installed EndeavourOS to avoid this very mess. A number of package names had changed, and there were a couple sets of mutually dependent packages. I think I had to mark around five to seven for removal before it went through. The longest part was sitting through package verification every time. GRUB was then a standard and easy re-install.
I found a line-by-line systemd-boot reinstall tutorial for my EndeavourOS drive. I sadly don’t have a link because I wasn’t yet planning on this being my topic for the week and I was kind of in panic mode. What I do remember is that I expected to need chroot, but I looked at the documentation (man page / <program> -h / <program> –help) and the command was flexible enough to point it at my broken installation. It was also a pain to find because so many search results were either about GRUB and/or Windows.
The Importance of Cable Management
While I had my computer apart diagnosing SATA cables, I took the opportunity to mount my third solid state drive. Previously, I only had access to cables with L shaped connectors on one end, but I have a package with a bunch of double-straight ones now. I had two free motherboard connections, and the straight ends let me stack my Linux drives in my compatible bracket while my [defunct?] Windows drive now gets a single-SSD bracket.
Alarmingly, my computer started making a bit of noise once I had it all back together in its place and I had started up a game. Turns out a ribbon cable going between the motherboard and front panel was pushed into the fan blades on my GPU, which was simple to fix.
Takeaway
Surprise topics are rarely fun. But solving these problems as they come up is how you learn Linux.
Final Question
What I could not find an answer to was if systemd-boot systems can be booted from a GRUB disk at all. I’m guessing no because systemd-boot is more integral to Linux than GRUB. Do you know how close or far I am? I look forward to hearing from you in the comments below or on my Socials!