Load up an efi shell (a lot of modern motherboards have an option for this, else burn a USB), then just navigate to the bootloader in your EFI partition
Arch Linux
The beloved lightweight distro
You can fix this, and this certainly isn't "basic".
I figure you didn't see your Linux option, because your EFI boot variables (boot order and boot loader locations) are stored "on the mainboard", and you didn't manage to reset those on the new board according to your current layout. Windows still boots, as it installs its bootloader in a generic location intended for removable devices, instead of properly registering itself with EFI boot variables. Because of course they do.
To fix this, I'd recommend a deep breath first, and then set BIOS to UEFI boot only, no CSM/legacy at all for now, no even as fallback. If you're lucky, you can boot into your Linux system from the BIOS boot menu right now, and skip the archiso boot and chroot shenanigans. Have a look. Otherwise boot into the archiso as you did before.
Identify your EFI system partition(s) (ESP)
Run sfdisk -l /dev/nvme0n1
and sfdisk -l /dev/nvme1n1
, note the "EFI System" type partitions. Ideally, there's only one at nvme1n1p3
. Multiple ESPs would be trickier, but let's assume your singular ESP is nvme1n1p3
.
Have a look at the ESP, to understand its layout and confirm this is really what you're looking for: mkdir /esp
, mount /dev/nvme1n1p3 /esp
, find /esp
.
You should find the Windows bootloader at EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi
and EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
.
You might also find your grub bootloader in a subdirectory like EFI/arch/grubx64.efi
. Find all of your instances with find /esp -iname grubx64.efi
, and note the paths. If you find multiple grubx64.efi, I'd recommend to pick only the newest file, unless you know for a fact which one is supposed to be the one you want to use. A ls -l <file>
gives you the date of the file to check. If you don't have any grub bootloader installed, yet, that's fine, too.
Create a boot entry with grub in a chrooted system
If you can arch-chroot
into your Linux system, make sure your ESP is mounted in your chroot as well, let's say at /esp
again, and your /boot
directory must be mounted, too, otherwise grub-install will fail. Then grub-install --efi-directory=/esp
should do its magic just fine.
Use efibootmgr
to display/edit the EFI boot variables, and check if the entries in there look correct. The ESP will be referenced by UUID, and the list will look pretty busy, but you should recognize the EFI paths, and your arch
entry should be the BootCurrent value.
Make sure you've got a /boot/grub/grub.cfg
in place, otherwise grub won't do you much good! Create one with grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
from within your chroot, after editing /etc/default/grub
if you need to add any kernel arguments for your system. Usually you do not, so fire away.
If chrooting doesn't work for you, btrfs can be a little tricky, you should be able to install grub with the ESP and boot partition mounted alone in the archiso. nvme0n1p1 looks like your boot partition, so it'd go down like this:
mkdir /esp /linuxboot
mount /dev/nvme1n1p3 /esp
mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /linuxboot
grub-install --efi-directory=/esp --boot-directory=/linuxboot
You can pacman -S grub
if grub-install
isn't available on archiso, yet.
Make sure you've got a /linuxboot/grub/grub.cfg
in place here as well. Unfortunately you cannot use grub-mkconfig
effectively without the chroot, but if you are at this point, and you're dropped into the grub rescue shell, you can try a minimal, lovingly handcrafted grub.cfg:
You need to obtain the UUIDs of your ESP, boot and root partition for the menuentries, and replace the placeholders with your values. You can get those values with lsblk -oNAME,UUID /dev/nvme1n1p3 /dev/nvme0n1p1 /dev/nvme0n1p2
, in this order (ESP, BOOTPART, ROOTPART UUID). I assume your root subvolume is named root
, and your kernel is named vmlinuz-linux
on the boot partition, with a vmlinuz-linux.img
initfs. You should adapt these filenames in the grub.cfg if they are different, of course, but I think this is a pretty good guess. :)
insmod part_gpt
insmod part_msdos
set default="0"
if [ x"${feature_menuentry_id}" = xy ]; then
menuentry_id_option="--id"
else
menuentry_id_option=""
fi
export menuentry_id_option
function load_video {
if [ x$feature_all_video_module = xy ]; then
insmod all_video
else
insmod efi_gop
insmod efi_uga
insmod ieee1275_fb
insmod vbe
insmod vga
insmod video_bochs
insmod video_cirrus
fi
}
terminal_input console
terminal_output console
set timeout=5
menuentry 'Arch Linux' --class arch --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-simple' {
load_video
set gfxpayload=keep
insmod gzio
insmod part_gpt
insmod ext2
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root <BOOTPART UUID>
echo 'Loading Linux linux ...'
linux /vmlinuz-linux root=UUID=<ROOTPART UUID> rw rootflags=subvol=root
echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...'
initrd /initramfs-linux.img
}
if [ "$grub_platform" = "efi" ]; then
insmod bli
fi
if [ "$grub_platform" = "efi" ]; then
menuentry 'Windows Boot Manager --class windows --class os $menuentry_id_option 'osprober-efi' {
insmod part_gpt
insmod fat
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root <ESP UUID>
chainloader /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
}
fi
Let's see how this goes.
Thank you!
Switch from bios to uefi boot mode (or vice versa)?
Sometimes called legacy bios or something? From a quick google, might be called CSM
This is most likely it. Seems some newer boards don't just nicely support both UEFI and legacy booting and will straight up only do one or the other
By default my motherboard came in with UEFI and I switched it to CMS and I did see more boot options they are USB Key
,USB Floppy
, and Network
. I'm going to get a random 128gb SSD and use archinstall on it to see if show up on my system.
Odd that the disk didn't show up in the list there. If there are other options near CMS maybe have a play with them?
Another option to checkout is to disable secure boot?
Something to try:
Boot into a Linux liveUSB environment. Then, chroot into your Linux partition (you can use Gentoo's chroot instructions from their handbook).
Once inside the chroot, reinstall your boot loader (grub or systemd).
I have a suspicion that Windows had its way with your boot partition.
What files do you have in /dev/nvme0n1p1
?
From the looks of it, that should be your linux boot partition.
If you can, just remove every other drive temporarily while you focus on that specific drive. This will help avoid making changes to the windows bootloader.
From there, boot into an arch iso, mount your btrfs subvolumes (i.e. /mnt and /mnt/home and /mnt/var/logs and whatever other subvolumes you have), mount your boot partition into your btrfs mount point (i.e /mnt/boot), and then arch-chroot
into your system (/mnt).
From there you'll be in your actual system. If you're using systemd-boot
, run the bootctl install
command. This will copy the systemd-boot UEFI boot manager to the ESP, create a UEFI boot entry for it and set it as the first in the UEFI boot order.
If you are using grub, follow the grub guidelines for installing their bootloader (im not familiar with grub commands).
Once that is done, go ahead and run mkinitcpio -P
to make sure your kernel images are bootable options for your bootloader.
After that, exit and unmount the boot and BTRFS subvolumes and reboot.
That should get you back into your system.
New motherboard with new boot options, and possibly an incompatible partition scheme.
Pull up the boot menu during POST and force it to boot the partition. That usually works depending on the manufacturer.
Otherwise, get a LiveUSB and make sure your drive is actually showing up post-boot.
How many hard drives do you have in your machine?
I have one HDD /dev/sda
. Two SDD. /dev/nvme0n1
is my linux install while /dev/nvme1n1
is Windows 11 IoT. and I have a pcie card that has a micro sd card (nanokvm).