Csdrhrt

I just got a new Laptop:
Acer TravelMate X3 X349-G2-M-5910 Intel Core i5-7200U 8GB DDR4 256GB PCIe SSD Full-HD IPS Linux

It comes with "endless OS" preinstalled, which did actually boot. I replaced it and whatever I do now, when rebooting after installation, it will say "no bootable device found".

The full story: I installed antergos from a USB drive, which is close to a Arch Linux with an installer. For that, I disabled secure boot and installed antergos. I did not manually partition the drive, but had the installer do it.
First, I chose systemd-boot as bootloader. Everything seemed to work -> reboot -> no bootable device found
I checked a reasonable boot order in the firmware interface of course.
Everything seemed to be where it should. /etc/fstab looked fine (to what I can say), kernel was there, vmlinux-linux. I concluded it would be the bootloader.

I reinstalled, this time using GRUB2 as bootloader in the installer. Same result.
I now tried to configure efibootmgr (as I use it on my main notebook), redo the mkinitcpio. No improvements.

I suspected it to be a UEFI issue, so I switched to legacy boot and did a completely new install. Still "no bootable device found"

I switched back to UEFI and now returned to a "classical" arch iso and did the whole installation manually. 512MB fat32 partition, set to "EFI System" in fdisk.
A root partition, an extra /home partition and a swap partition. Tried efibootmgr and GRUB2. Every time I do the installation, everything seems to work fine, until reboot.

Due to upcoming desperation I then tried Manjaro. Same result at first, but then I noticed, the installer allows me to choose existing EFI bootloaders. The current entries are:
(hd1,gpt1) /efi/grub/grubx64.efi
(hd1,gpt1)/efi/Manjaro/grubx64.efi
(hd1,gpt1)/efi/boot/bootx64.efi

The first one will end in the grub rescue shell, but the other two options do actually start the installed manjaro. Interestingly, with the third option the touchpad will not work.

So it seams everything is there and working and can be booted from a USB drive. But not from the HDD itself.

I did another new Arch install with systemd-boot and the problem persists.
The output of mount is (from arch-chroot of course):

/dev/nvme0n1p2 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime)

/dev/nvme0n1p1 on /boot type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro)

proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)

sys on /sys type sysfs (ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)

efivarfs on /sys/firmware/efi/efivars type efivarfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)

udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,nosuid,relatime,size=3993364k,nr_inodes=998341,mode=755)

devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000)

shm on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime)

run on /run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,mode=755)

tmp on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)

airootfs on /etc/resolv.conf type overlay (rw,relatime,lowerdir=/run/archiso/sfs/airootfs,upperdir=/run/archiso/cowspace/persistent_ARCH_201901/x86_64/upperdir,workdir=/run/archiso/cowspace/persistent_ARCH_201901/x86_64/workdir)

I then did

# bootctl --path=/boot install



Created "/boot/EFI".

Created "/boot/EFI/systemd".

Created "/boot/EFI/BOOT".

Created "/boot/loader".

Created "/boot/loader/entries".

Copied "/usr/lib/systemd/boot/efi/systemd-bootx64.efi" to "/boot/EFI/systemd/systemd-bootx64.efi".

Copied "/usr/lib/systemd/boot/efi/systemd-bootx64.efi" to "/boot/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI".

Created EFI boot entry "Linux Boot Manager".$

I edited the file /boot/loader/loader.conf as follows:

#timeout 3

#console-mode keep

#default fa1e460cf7c84ae6aec95ef492a78e3a-*

default arch

timeout 3

console-mode max

editor no 

and added the file /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf

title   Arch Linux

linux   /vmlinuz-linux

initrd  /intel-ucode.img

initrd  /initramfs-linux.img

options root=/dev/nvme0n1p2 rw

the ucode image is present in /boot, as well as the other images.

I also checked the firmware again. The only thing that appeared interesting to me is "Change TPM (TCM) State", which was enabled. disabling did not help.

What I find most surprising, is that it does not work neither in UEFI nor in legacy boot mode.

Any idea how I could overcome this nuisance would be highly appreciated.

Thank you very much in advance