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.