Arch Linux

BeepBoopItsJoop

Member

Registered: 2026-07-24

Posts: 2

[SOLVED]Boot started failing and sending me to UEFI

SOLVED - Removed the CMOS battery and let the motherboard discharge, now everything works 

After a restart last night my pc refuses to boot into arch. At the time of restart I hadn't done -Suy (only installed bat ig?), and was editing configs for hyprland (unrelated).
After hours of debugging and chatgpt'ing through arch on a thumb drive, the closest thing to a lead I could find was this line in journalctl from pacman running 35-systemd-update.hook, which I have no idea if it means anything at all.

Do you think this is a hardware issue? It happened so suddenly and I'm out of ideas.

System info:
Arch/Hyprland
Booting with systemd-boot
Flashed Arch iso on thumb drive with Ventoy
Configs and logs are on the bottom of the post
Note, Normal mode in Ventoy kicks me out so i used GRUB2 mode. Later I discovered a newly flashed arch iso (via dd instead of Ventoy) doesn't let me boot into it via UEFI, only BIOS.
Gigabyte b650 motherboard
Here is what I tried so far:
(I'm not fully aware of how everything here works, apologies)
* bootctl install (systemd-boot)
modifies my main drive's boot partition, at the end outputs Not booted with EFI running in a container, skipping EFI variable modifications.
* mkinitcpio -P
* Reinstalled systemd-boot and kernel
* Edited loader.conf, changed default arch.conf to default *conf name in entries/*, also increased timeout from 0 to default 3
* There was a duplicate entry in /etc/fstab which I removed.
* in /etc/fstab, changed fmask and dmask from 0022 to 0077 because I was getting an error about that

bootctl status
Available Boot Loaders on ESP 
  ESP: /boot 
  File: /boot//EFI/systemd/systemd-bootx64.efi (systemd-boot 261.1-1-arch) 
  /boot//EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64EFI (systemd-boot 261.1-1-arch) 

Boot Loader Entry Locations: 
  ESP: /boot ($BOOT) 
  config: /boot//loader/loader.conf 
  token: arch 

Default Boot Loader Entry: 
  type: Boot Loader Specification Type #1 (.conf) 
  title: Arch Linux (linux) 
  id: 2026-06-17_12-25_40_linux.conf 
  source: /boot//loader/entries/2026-06-17_12-25-40_linux.conf (on the EFI System Partition) 
  linux: /boot//vmlinuz-linux 
  initrd: /boot//amd-ucode.img 
            /boot//initram-linux.img
  options: root=PARTUUID=2b3afdce06b88-46b6-ab16-b407e88ec6c8 zswap.enabled=0 rw rootfstype=ext4 
pacman.log
[PACMAN] Running 'pacman -S bat'
[ALPM] transaction started
[ALPM] installed bat (0.26.1-2)
[ALPM] transaction completed
[ALPM] running '35-systemd-update.hook'...   
~/.bash_history
Went through it and I didn't do anything apart from pacman -S bat and editing a bunch of files

I am thankful for any response or idea about what could be happening, thank you.

Last edited by BeepBoopItsJoop (2026-07-24 17:29:54)

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 76,983

Re: [SOLVED]Boot started failing and sending me to UEFI

Please elaborate on the symptoms:
At which point and how is it "failing"?
Do you still reach the bootloader?
Do you get any error messages? Or actual boot messages?
Is the bootctl status from the chroot? (Or does this simply reflect the install iso?)

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BeepBoopItsJoop

Member

Registered: 2026-07-24

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED]Boot started failing and sending me to UEFI

Please elaborate on the symptoms:
At which point and how is it "failing"?
Do you still reach the bootloader?
Do you get any error messages? Or actual boot messages?
Is the bootctl status from the chroot? (Or does this simply reflect the install iso?)

Hello, thank you for a reply. It ended up being a hardware/firmware issue, removing the CMOS battery and letting the motherboard discharge fixed the problem. 
For the record, I didn't reach the bootloader at all, there were no messages/logs and the bootctl status was from arch-chroot, yes. In hindsight, this was enough to deduce it wasn't a software/OS issue, but I really couldn'tt tell as I'm not familiar enough with the system overall.

Last edited by BeepBoopItsJoop (2026-07-24 17:34:18)