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?

  • 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
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      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 😂

      • 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@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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        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

    • Cwilliams@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

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

      • 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.

    • 257m@lemmy.mlOP
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      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.