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?

  • Skull giver
    71•2 years ago

    Common steps to fix you system:

    1. 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.
    2. Boot into a live environment
    3. 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
    4. Let pacman do its thing
    5. Update initramfs for good measure, reinstall your bootloader
    6. 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
      19•2 years ago

      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 😂

      • Skull giver
        18•2 years 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.

      • Skull giver
        16•2 years ago

        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

          • Skull giver
            4•2 years ago

            Strange, it was in your earlier screenshot. Check if you find any disks in /dev and find the right partitions.

          • Skull giver
            3•2 years ago

            umount . Make sure to unmount the inner directories first (/dev/pts) before unmounting the outer ones (/dev).

            When unmounting doesn’t work, you can always exit and reboot the live installer.

          • Skull giver
            5•2 years ago

            If you’re using btrfs: yes, I think so. Double check your btrfs subvolumes to see if you need to mount more than just the partition.

            If you’re using BTRFS, I recommend checking out Timeshift to make automatic snapshots you can later revert to.

          • Skull giver
            5•2 years ago

            I forgot to add: before running chroot, you may need to cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/etc/resolv.conf or you may not have a working DNS server

    • @Cwilliams@beehaw.org
      3•2 years ago

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

      • Skull giver
        1•2 years ago

        I think it depends on what step failed, if the mkinitcpio step was already executed it may not get called again, so I included it just in case.

        Looks like OP was pretty unlucky according one of their screenshots, the crash seems to have happend while installing the Nvidia DKMS module.

    • 257mOP
      1•2 years ago

      I couldn’t figure out how to mount /dev/sda1 and did pacman -Syu and then I mounted it once I figured it out now pacman says there is nothing to do.

      • Skull giver
        2•2 years ago

        Then try rebuilding the initramfs (mkinitcpio -P for example) and reinstalling your bootloader.

      • 257mOP
        1•2 years ago

        Nevermind I ran a script that looped through all packages in the output of pacman -Qk and reinstalled them.