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Neil Bothwick   is Dr. Tux to you! Fixing all poblems dead(ish)!

Q  Sticking the boot back in

I tried to install Manjaro (after reading your article on it) on an old Acer laptop that could no longer update Windows 10 as it’s only a 32GB SSD. I thought I was doing well and was happy using it, but had issues with it not shutting down and only booting up when AC power was plugged in. I got around the boot issue by disabling TLP, but wanted a proper fix. I changed a TLP setting to ignore AC, and prioritise battery and now it won’t boot at all.

I’ve read articles that suggest using an installation media and mounting the old boot partition, but then what? Should I mount a different partition that contains the rest of the filesystem to edit the config file? It would be great if I can recover this and any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated. 

Ismail

A  It’s very easy to get in a mess when fiddling with BIOS settings, so your best bet is to go back to a good base. You should find a reset option in the BIOS menus: sometimes it’s “Load optimised settings” or similar. Once you’ve done this, turn off any secure boot feature to allow it to use the bootloader installed by Manjaro.

This may be enough to get you booting. If not, the next step is to activate the CSM (Compatibility Support Module) option. This enables booting through the old bootloader method rather than the newer UEFI, although any modern distro should have set your computer to boot with UEFI.

If you still can’t boot, how far is it getting? Are you getting any sort of bootloader prompt or menu, or a message about not finding a disk? The exact path you take depends on just what’s happening. Booting a live disc and mounting the boot partition to try to fix things is one way of dealing with some of these issues, but it requires plenty of background knowledge and careful reading. Fortunately, there is an easier way where someone else has done all the hard work – it’s called Rescatux (http://rescatux.org).

Rescatux is a live CD designed specifically for fixing the sort of problems that stop you booting your computer; from bootloader woes to corrupted filesystems. Download the ISO image, write it to a CD or USB stick and boot from it. You’ll see a menu of the various tasks it can carry out, and each one links first of all to helpful documentation on how to use it, and then a button to execute the task.