Bdtyktl

system:

Manjaro running on an m.2 nvme drive, Windows 10 running on a separate HDD

Problem:

Over the holidays I seem to have messed up my system pretty badly. I have had a stable system for several months, but I wanted the security features of SecureBoot, so I enabled it in the bios. Ever since my system has been unable to boot into Manjaro, and will only load Win10. I reset the secure boot settings, but the problem remains.

Currently I am able to boot into a live Manjaro disk made using Rufus in dd mode. I have used mhwd-chroot to access my existing install on nvme0n1p2, and can therefore backup my files. I attempted to run grub-install /dev/nvme0n1, and got:

grub-install: error: cannot fine EFI directory.

after poking around, I found that my EFI directory for Manjaro appears to be in nvme0n1p1. So I tried mounting it:

# mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /boot/efi

mount: /boot/efi: unknown filesystem type 'BitLocker'

Looking at lsblk -f, I can see that that partition is indeed listed as BitLocker (as is /dev/sda3, the windows file system partition). Am I correct in assuming that this looks like Win10 encrypted my EFI partition? What would my next steps for recovery be? Could I use GParted to re-format that partition, then mount it to /boot/efi, then run grub-install?

for additional info, I did try to use a boot recovery tool, but aparently it only does well with Ubuntu distros. regardless, here is a pastebin of its analysis, which may or may not be helpful: http://paste.ubuntu.com/p/PkmfdtxHjq/

So after much pain and suffering, I have resolved my issues. I think my instincts before were correct - somehow the action of turning on secure boot and then booting into windows encrypted my linux EFI partition nvme0n1p1. I would likely have been fine going with my instincts and wiping that partition, but since it was only 300MiB, it wasn't worth the space, so just in case I created a new partition. Here's the steps I took to resolve this issue:

1. Boot into a Manjaro live usb


2. Run GParted


3. Create a new 300MiB partition between the BitLocker'd nvme0n1p1 and my filesystem running on nvme0n1p2 by shrinking nvme0n1p2 from the left. New partition should be fat32


4. Apply changes in GParted


5. Apply the boot and esp flags to the new partition (nvme0n1p4) via GParted


6. Us mhwd-chroot-shell to chroot into your system (nvme0n1p2)


7. Change /etc/fstab to use the new partition instead of the old one.


8. Update GRUB

updating grub:

$ sudo su

# grub-install /dev/nvme0n1

# update-grub

fstab changes:

- UUID=319a7d84-9d20-4f5f87f3-10948da50d73  /boot/efi   /dev/nvme0n1p4: PARTUUID=   defaults    0   1

+ UUID=C410-9DC8    /boot/efi   vfat    defaults    0   2

I'm not sure why the original line there had a different format. Originally my new line followed the same format, but that would not boot either. After some more reading I seemed clear that it should have a 2, not a 1 at the end, and the extra details didn't belong.

At this point in the process I restarted my machine without the live usb plugged in, thinking I had figured it out, but the same issue was still present. So a few more steps were needed:

9. Reboot with live usb plugged in until you get to the Live Usb's boot loader menu. Towards the bottom there is an option to 'Detect EFI Bootloader'.


10. Select the bootloader for your device. In my case, (hd1,4)


11. At this point my original GRUB loaded, and I was able to log into my system. Once in, I updated grub again (same commands as before). I am now able to boot into my system as normal! No Live USB Required!

This is all new to me, as I've never had this sort of issue before. Hopefully someone else out there can use this information.

A final note on mhwd-chroot-shell: I ran into some trouble with it, as it would not detect the /etc/ directory in my nvme0n1p2 partition, so it did not recognize any linux systems. To get around this, I ended up tweaking the shell script. Just before it would throw the error of "No Linux Systems found!", I added a check to manually inject my partition into it if it failed to detect any:

if [ $nbpart -eq 0 ]; then

    list[$nbpart]=/dev/nvme0n1p2

    ((nbpart++))

fi