Boot after swapping hard drives

After you swap a drive, the firmware can lose the EFI boot entry for Garuda. The BIOS then shows no boot option for the disk, even though Garuda is still installed. The fix below reinstalls GRUB into the EFI system partition from a live ISO.

Caution

Use a Garuda live ISO to repair the boot entry. Keep your backups up to date before you change anything.

What you need

• A USB stick with a Garuda live ISO
• The disk with Garuda installed, connected to the system
• Boot into the live ISO before you change anything on the installed system

Repair the boot entry

1. Create a USB stick with a Garuda ISO if you do not have one yet. Boot it.

2. Open Garuda Toolbox > Boot Repair from the live system.

3. Choose Reinstall GRUB. Select the root partition of your Garuda installation and the target ESP.

4. Click Apply. The Toolbox mounts the installation in a chroot, including the EFI partition at /boot/efi. It then runs grub-install --bootloader-id=Garuda and update-grub by itself, so it also finds all installations and snapshots.

5. Reboot with systemctl reboot or from the desktop menu.

Note

Running update-grub in the chroot alone did not fix the boot entry in testing. Run grub-install first.

Tip

The bootloader ID must be Garuda with a capital G. This matches the ID that the Garuda installer and the Toolbox Boot Repair use, so the entry is written to EFI/Garuda.

Fallback: run the commands by hand

If the Toolbox does not work for you, chroot into your installation by hand. Mount the EFI partition at /boot/efi inside the chroot first.

1. Reinstall GRUB:

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

2. Regenerate the GRUB menu so it finds all installations and snapshots:

   update-grub

3. Type exit to leave the chroot.

4. Reboot with systemctl reboot or from the desktop menu.

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Source: What to do after SWAPPING HARDDRIVES get BOOT back on LAZY WAY on the Garuda forum by Duke187.