this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023

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I accidently rebooted during pacman update and now my system dosen't show option to boot into endeavour os. Systemd just shows option to boot into firmware interface please help! (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by 257m@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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I've lost everything and I don't know how to get it back. How can I repair my system all I have is a usb with slax linux. I am freaking out because I had a lot of projects on their that I hadn't pushed to github as well as my configs and rice. Is there any way to repair my system? Can I get a shell from systemd?

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[–] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 70 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Common steps to fix you system:

Get an Endeavour installer (Arch would probably also work but best to stick with the distro you installed). You can boot the Slax USB drive to get into Linux and make an installer drive on another USB drive.
Boot into a live environment
Either use arch-chroot or chroot and a bunch of (bind) mounts to get a shell within the context of the distro on your disk
Let pacman do its thing
Update initramfs for good measure, reinstall your bootloader
Reboot, pray

If your bootloader is still there but just doesn't show up in the boot menu, try to find an option to boot an .efi file ("boot from file" or similar). If you can launch your bootloader manually and it works, reinstall it or manually re-register it using efibootmgr

[–] silasmariner@programming.dev 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh my God. Flashbacks to the first time I fucked up my Arch installation like a decade ago. This is a solid run-through of a very character-building exercise 😂

[–] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 19 points 1 year ago

It's like a rite of passage that brings Arch(-based) Linux users to the next level of the sacred tomb of Linux. When you break an install this bad, you either move back to Windows or become the person people ask for help when their bootloader is somehow fucked.

[+] 257m@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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[–] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

Probably. Try this:

# Mount the partitions to a subdirectory of /mnt
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
# Copy over your most important files just in case
cp -a /home/your-user/my-super-important-folder /media/root/some-usb-drive
# Or upload them to GDrive/OneDrive/iCloud/your favourite FTP server
# Now to fix the system
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/efi
mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts
mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
mount --bind /tmp /mnt/tmp
mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
mount --bind /var/run /mnt/var/run
mount --bind /run /mnt/run
# Enter a shell in /mnt
chroot /mnt
# Now you should have a shell works as if you had a live, running system.
pacman -Syu

You can get some weird errors about /dev files not being valid or whatever, but you can usually safely ignore those.

This assumes that /mnt/sda1 is your UEFI partition

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[–] pixeled@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

This is the best comment here.

[–] Cwilliams@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pretty sure pacman runs mkinitcpio by itself, but I guess a second time for good measure couldn't hurt

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[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not an endavour/arch user, but have been in similar situation.

What I did:

boot into live USB
mount the problematic rootfs
chroot to it
run pacman update

Archwiki has a nice article on chroot

[–] garam@lemmy.my.id 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Is this work for every system? Like Fedora?

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well , except the pacman part. The chroot part should certainly work.

[–] garam@lemmy.my.id 2 points 1 year ago

Thank you. Seems it's fun to delve into. Thanks!

[–] icedterminal@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Yup. Mount your disk and chroot into it.

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

You may need to adapt the last part to your needs.

Example:

for Fedora, you'd use dnf instead of pacman
if your bootloader is broken, you'd want to run grub-install or grub-mkconfig
if your initramfs doesn't recognize your new partition, you'd want to regenerate it with the current fstab or crypttab

[–] Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee 24 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Boot to a liveUSB of the distro of your choice, create a chroot to your install, and then run a Pacman update from there.

Googling “Arch rescue chroot” should point you in the right direction. Good luck!

[–] 257m@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Will this work from slax linux? I am sorry if I seem like I can't fix the issue myself seeing as you have given the resources for me to do so but what would be the exact steps to do that?

[–] Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I’ve never used Slax but it should, boot the liveUSB and enter terminal.

The general process is:

Boot to live Slax
Mount your install
Mount /proc, /sys, /dev
Enter the chroot
Check if networking is working
Attempt to run commands in your chroot
Exit the chroot
Unmount everything
Boot back to your install

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chroot

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[–] angrymouse@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It should work, afaik chroot always use the binaries of the system you chrooted, so you will be able to use pacman normally. I don´t remember if chroot will mount the efi partition by default, you can do this before go to chroot (again, I'm have some memory issues but I believe that /dev does not mount as well if you just use chroot, this is why arch have arch-chroot that mounts this kind of stuff but you can mount before so it should work).

Assuming you are using systemd boot on efi partition (that is likelly if you have not changed the installer defaults), what I would do:

On your live CD run sudo fdisk -l to get what is the efi partition, usually will be /dev/sdb1 since sda will be your usb, you should be able to see something like that.
Then you will mount your endevour partition, in your situation should be sudo mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt/mydisk but check your fdisk command output.
Now you will have to mount the efi partition sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/mydisk/efi
Then you can use chroot /mnt/mydisk/ and proceed to do a pacman -Syu, this should trigger the post scripts that create the kernel images on the efi partition.

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[–] jabberati@social.anoxinon.de 14 points 1 year ago (15 children)

Btw if you solved this, you should probably put your config files into git for backup: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dotfiles

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

[–] deo@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

i dunno why you gotta call me out like that...

[–] darcy@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

hey thanks man

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[–] bbbhltz@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Been here before, but didn't bother asking for help. Just used a liveusb to grab what I needed and reinstalled. I need to learn how to chroot ...

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[–] hperrin@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

If nothing else, your files are all fine. You can mount your drive on a different system (like a live USB) and copy all your files.

[–] QuazarOmega@lemy.lol 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

To add to the other responses, after you recovered your stuff you could probably like moving to an immutable OS if you risk having power issues often, the transactions won't be applied until everything is done so if anything happens during a transaction you'll just remain at your last usable state

[–] Guenther_Amanita@feddit.de 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I had the same thought, but didn't want to sound insensitive.

Saying "Your fault, using Arch for something important is a bad idea, you should have made a backup before", while he fears all his important data is gone, would have been rude and very unhelpful.

But immutable distros solve these issues, yes. Since I switched to Silverblue I've never been more relaxed than ever. If something goes bad, I just select the old state and everything works, and updates never get applied incompletely like here.

[–] QuazarOmega@lemy.lol 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm sorry if I sounded insensitive, it wasn't my intention, just thought that since many others had already given a solution to the data and even OS recovery I could chip in to add something that they might find useful, if they don't mind switching away from Arch.
I hope mine would be a reassuring suggestion more than anything

[–] Guenther_Amanita@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

You didn't! :) You couldn't have said it better, especially in your answer here!

As I said, I had the same thought as you with immutable distros like SB or Nix.

I just didn't have much to add as an additional comment besides "Kids, this why you should always backup and maybe use an immutable distro if you can".

As someone who values robustness and comfort, I wouldn't touch something arch-based even with a broom-pole.

If I wanted something that's a rolling release, I would use Tumbleweed or it's immutable variant.

For me at least, the only pro in Arch is that you can configure everything exactly to your imagination, if I know exactly what I'm doing. And EndeavorOS is pretty much a pre-configured Arch that removes the only USP of it, the DIY-element.

I don't see myself as competent enough to maintain my arch install, but I can access the AUR with distrobox on every other distro, like Silverblue, too, so I don't care. The big software repository isn't an argument for me in 2023 anymore. With distrobox my arch stuff is isolated and if something breaks, I can just forget my two installed apps and reinstall this container in 2 minutes.

It's just an unimaginable peace of mind for me to know that if I shut down my PC today it will work perfectly tomorrow too. I'm just sick of reinstalling or fixing shit for hours every weekend. I'm too tired for that and have other responsibilities.

But yeah. My thoughts were exactly the same as yours and I didn't have much more to add besides saying "Hey, do xy that this won't happen anymore in the future" without sounding like Captain Hindsight from South Park. Context

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[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Note that this isn't about immutability but atomicity. Current immutable usually have that feature aswell but you don't need immutability to achieve it.

[–] QuazarOmega@lemy.lol 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah you're right, however searching "linux distro with atomic updates" doesn't seem to turn up much, as you say, in most cases the two features happen to come together and the distros that have them are mostly known for the former

[–] 257m@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

Thank you all for offering advice. I did eventually get it working and repaired all the packages.

[–] moreeni@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There is nothing worth of freaking out in your situation. Your files shouldn't have been impacted at all.

Boot from LiveUSB and reinstall the packages you were updating, maybe reinstall grub too.

There are tons of guides for this in the Internet, like this one: https://www.jeremymorgan.com/tutorials/linux/how-to-reinstall-boot-loader-arch-linux/

Edit: since you probably use systemd-boot, as I can see from your post, obviously the grub part of my comment shouldn't be done. Replace those parts with systemd-boot reinstallation. Even better if pacman will update it, because there's probably some hook already to do things manually and you won't have to touch systemd-boot at all

[–] breadsmasher@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Assuming you have access to a secondary computer to make a LiveUSB

boot a live disk/USB on your PC and copy the data you want off. Then reinstall the OS.
If you haven’t got a drive you can move data to, from the live OS, partition your disk and move the data to the new partition CAUTION ON PARTITIONING

[–] zloubida@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Other people will probably give you better answers, but I think the solution is quite easy: chroot and relauch the update.

[–] moreeni@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Pretty much all the other answers are coming down to this, yeah.

[–] PlusMinus@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Boot a live Linux, chroot into your system, run pacman again and fix your systemd boot to include a fallback option for the next time this happens.

[–] hubobes@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does Timeshift work on Arch? If so I would look into it, saved my ass a few times.

[–] thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Timeshift definitely works on Arch (I use it before every update) but it isn't going to help OP if he hasnt taken an image already

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