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@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    70·
    1 year 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
      17·
      1 year 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@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
        19·
        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.

    • Cwilliams@beehaw.org
      3·
      1 year ago

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

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
        1·
        1 year 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.

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
        15·
        1 year 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

    • 257m@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      1 year 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.