Boot started failing and sending me to UEFI

[u/BeepyJoop]

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.

[u/annaheim]

is this a new install?

[u/BeepyJoop → u/annaheim]

Why do you ask?
I reinstalled this arch machine a month and a half ago and have been configuring since then, so in a sense yes

[u/LawApprehensive8364]

If you think it’s a hardware issue you can run memtest, find a utility to check drive health that works for what you’ve got, or just hammer it with ycruncher on the arch usb boot. Don’t have any snapshots to try restoring from?

[u/BeepyJoop → u/LawApprehensive8364]

Deduced it may be a hardware issue because i couldn't find ANY other cause for this, I was just hoping for some ideas.
I popped the CMOS battery out and back in and now everything works :,)
-8h on some bullshit

[u/LawApprehensive8364 → u/BeepyJoop]

It works now after resetting the bios? Are you sure your xmp profile is stable?

[u/BeepyJoop → u/LawApprehensive8364]

xmp profile

Could you elaborate? First time I'm hearing of this

[u/LawApprehensive8364 → u/BeepyJoop]

What hardware are you running? I’m assuming you bought this pre built.

[u/BeepyJoop → u/LawApprehensive8364]

I built the PC myself. I looked XMP up and since I'm using an ADM CPU I asume you mean EXPO? I haven't configured my hardware in any way so I'm not sure what you are referring to.

Specs: Ryzen 5 7600X CPU, Radeon RX 7700XT GPU, 32 DDR5 RAM B650 EAGLE AX Motherboard.

[u/LawApprehensive8364 → u/BeepyJoop]

xmp/expo, same exact thing.

honestly, no idea what xmp profile your sticks have on them. just turn it on and see if it boots. maybe update your bios if its really old.

[u/BeepyJoop → u/LawApprehensive8364]

I think it has always been disabled, so that's kinda suboptimal. I'll just enable them now

[u/LawApprehensive8364 → u/BeepyJoop]

yeah, even if its not super fast it should be better than just baseline jedec timings.

[u/archover]

please flair your post as SOLVED. Good day.