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?

  • Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee
    13·
    1 year ago

    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.mlOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      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?

      • angrymouse@lemmy.world
        4·
        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.

      • Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee
        3·
        1 year ago

        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

    • angrymouse@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      This one, I did it recently when my girlfriend uninstalled python that was necessary to run the process of creation the image of your kernel in the efi partition and happened the same thing, the update process removed the old images from efi partition but was not able to copy the new.

  • hperrin@lemmy.world
    4·
    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.

  • breadsmasher@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    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

  • 257m@lemmy.mlOP
    3·
    1 year ago

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

  • moreeni@lemm.ee
    2·
    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

  • Zloubida@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

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

  • PlusMinus@lemmy.world
    1·
    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.