Fixing Black Screen with Blinking Cursor Before GRUB in Manjaro

It has become a habit of mine to quickly shut down my laptop after a long day of work by using the terminal emulator and running the command:

shutdown -P 0

Boom! The laptop turns off instantly.

I’ve done this many times without any issues—until one day when I tried to continue working and found that my laptop couldn’t access GRUB, getting stuck on a black screen with a blinking cursor. The screen looked something like this:

In this situation, I couldn’t access either Manjaro or Windows 10. Fortunately, I had installed Windows 10 on a different hard drive from Manjaro, and its GRUB was installed on the hard drive containing Manjaro. So, I could simply select the boot option for the Windows 10 hard drive.

Next, I created a Manjaro Live USB. Initially, I used UNetbootin, but my laptop consistently failed to read the Live USB. The same happened with Rufus. After some research on forums, I found that a good software for creating a Live USB on Windows 10 is Etcher. Sure enough, my laptop could boot into the Manjaro Live USB with UEFI options.

In the Manjaro Live USB environment:

Open the terminal emulator.
Use root access:
```
sudo su
```

Before fixing the bootloader, install the following packages:

pacman -S mtools os-prober modprobe efivarfs efibootmgr dosfstools grub

Check the list of partitions to identify where the Manjaro system is installed:
```
lsblk -f
```
My Manjaro system is located at /dev/sdb2.
Mount the system partition to /mnt:
```
mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt
```
If the boot partition is separate, mount the boot partition to /boot:
```
mount /dev/sdb1 /boot
```
Change the directory to /mnt:
```
cd /mnt
```

Mount the following systems to the system directory:

mount -t proc proc /mnt/proc
mount -t sysfs sys /mnt/sys
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount -t devpts pts /mnt/dev/pts/
mount -t efivarfs efivarfs /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

Chroot into the mounted environment:
```
chroot /mnt
```
Create an EFI folder in the boot partition:
```
mkdir /boot/efi
```
Mount the boot partition to the previously created EFI folder:
```
mount /dev/sdb1 /boot/efi
```

Install GRUB with the target directory set to /boot/efi:

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=manjaro --recheck

Next, update GRUB:
```
update-grub
```
Finally, restart your laptop.

However, after restarting, I found that GRUB didn’t display the list of installed operating systems. The screen looked like this:

grub-prompt

At the GRUB prompt, execute the following commands:

grub search.file /etc/manjaro-release root
grub configfile /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Next, the GRUB menu for Manjaro will appear. Select Manjaro, open the terminal emulator, and run:

sudo grub-install /dev/sdb
sudo update-grub

Restart the laptop, and the GRUB menu should return to normal, displaying both Manjaro and Windows 10.

UPDATE

This issue occurred again after a system update:

Boot using the Live USB according to the mode in use (UEFI or BIOS-legacy).
Press C on the main Live USB menu screen. Do not enter the Live OS.
At the GRUB prompt:
```
grub echo $grub_platform
```
If the output is pc, then the mode is BIOS-legacy. If the output is efi, then the mode is UEFI. Match the mode selected with the type of Live USB used.
Type the following commands:
```
grub search.file /etc/manjaro-release root
grub configfile /boot/grub/grub.cfg
```
After running the above commands, the Manjaro GRUB menu will appear. Select Manjaro to enter the Manjaro OS.
Once inside the Manjaro OS, open the terminal emulator and type:
```
sudo grub-install /dev/sdb
sudo update-grub
```
Restart the laptop. Done!

Sources:

UPDATE

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