Reboot into firmware interface out of nowhere

General system Newbie
1

Yesterday I’ve been using eOS just fine, decided to update it with pacman -Syu before going to bed. Got some kind of an error I can’t really remember and shrugged it off thinking that “I’ll fix it tomorrow”, however after turning my PC on today I was met only with the “Reboot into firmware interface” option and nothing else.

Prior to update I didn’t do anything that could possibly affect it, I’ve been playing games on Steam and nothing else - no downloads, nothing.

After Googling for a couple of hours I think I may have found a problem. When running lsblk -f, my EFI partition wasn’t mounted anywhere for some reason, though I think it pretty much should.

I’m using a USB stick with Ventoy on it

I have tried chrooting from a live env and updating the system, the problem still persists and pacman says “there’s nothing more to do”. I’ve also reinstalled linuxheaders along with dracut.

I have also noticed that my kernel version is no longer 6.14, but 6.13.7-arch1-1 if that helps.

Kind of confused at this point, but I do believe that it has something to do with the mount point of my EFI partition, or rather the lack of it.

I’m using a UEFI system. Here’s the output of efibootmgr:

BootCurrent: 0006
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0006,0005,0000,0004
Boot0000* endeavouros   HD(1,GPT,1c28f725-d540-4cdf-b664-d49918b494dc,0x22,0x1007de)/\EFI\ENDEAVOUROS\GRUBX64.EFI
Boot0004* Linux Boot Manager    HD(1,GPT,1c28f725-d540-4cdf-b664-d49918b494dc,0x22,0x1007de)/\EFI\SYSTEMD\SYSTEMD-BOOTX64.EFI
Boot0005* UEFI OS       HD(1,GPT,1c28f725-d540-4cdf-b664-d49918b494dc,0x22,0x1007de)/\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI0000424f
Boot0006* UEFI: KingstonDataTraveler 3.00000, Partition 2       PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1,0x2)/Pci(0x0,0x0)/USB(10,0)/HD(2,MBR,0xec8c4733,0x7368000,0x10000)0000424f

I followed some guides online and tried to reinstall GRUB because I thought it might help. Before this problem I was booting off from Linux Boot Manager shown above, the endeavouros entry is a new one, but it didn’t help either

2

Here’s the lsblk -f of my CHROOT (IGNORE THE MOUNTPOINTS AS I MOUNTED SDA1 AND SDA2 PRIOR TO THIS POST, SDA2 WAS MOUNTED TO / BY DEFAULT, BUT SDA1 WAS BLANK)

NAME      FSTYPE   FSVER            LABEL      UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
loop0     squashfs 4.0                                                                             
sda                                                                                                
├─sda1    vfat     FAT32                       74DA-B469                             511.4M     0% /efi
└─sda2    ext4     1.0                         13d52602-50d5-4398-90fc-24973bbb3bec   69.9G    87% /
sdb                                                                                                
├─sdb1    exfat    1.0              Ventoy     4E21-0000                                           
│ └─ventoy
│         iso9660  Joliet Extension EOS_202503 2025-03-19-11-30-07-00                              
└─sdb2    vfat     FAT16            VTOYEFI    223C-F3F8
4

could be that this is shows as of using ISO and chroot?

5

default would be systemd-boot on EndeavourOS if you do not have that changed on initial install, or install is older as 2022.

6

It’s a new system and I didn’t change anything, so systemd-boot it is I suppose

7

It shows when chrooted from a live usb, yes

8

thats as of it uses the kernel from LiveISO so normal-.

can you show:
ls /efi/loader/entries

9

Shows nothing, it’s empty (doing that from chroot)

10

so you do not have /efi mounted properly the fat32 partition:

this:

├─sda1    vfat     FAT32                       74DA-B469                             511.4M     0% /efi

or is it?

and its empty? should not be that

11

Yeah, that’s what I thought, but how did eOS manage to work fine until I decided to update? Even though the update failed and no changed were made? That’s really weird… Could you please help me mount it to the right mount point?

12

cat /etc/fstab

will

show it

13 
cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a device; this may
# be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices that works even if
# disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system>             <mount point>  <type>  <options>  <dump>  <pass>
UUID=74DA-B469                            /efi           vfat    fmask=0137,dmask=0027 0 2
UUID=13d52602-50d5-4398-90fc-24973bbb3bec /              ext4    noatime    0 1
tmpfs                                     /tmp           tmpfs   defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
/swapfile                                           none         swap        sw         0       0
14

image

I suppose it’s not empty since 1.60 MB is being used?

15

thats systemd-boot and as you see /efi is the mountpoint for the efi partition.
You can redo the mount and chroot…


exit
sudo umount /mnt/efi
sudo umount /mnt
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
sudo /dev/sda1 /mnt/efi
sudo arch-chroot /mnt
ls /efi/
16

Here’s the output now:

[root@EndeavourOS /]# ls /efi/
c5ea3c97bb7c491b9c64cef5f811779b  EFI  loader
17

looks good now you had it mounted to /boot before

screenshot_2025-05-20_21-04-36
screenshot_2025-05-20_21-04-36883×236 37.1 KB

You should now be able to rebuild initramfs images:

reinstall-kernels

18

Alright, I reinstalled them. Gonna reboot and see if that helps, thanks for helping in advance :heart:

19

you should may also reinstall bootloader files.. but should work

20

Yes! It did! Had no idea about the reinstall-kernels command. You’re a life-saver, thank you so much

21

It can happen sometimes. You seem to have been exceptionally unlucky though.