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
    3·
    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
      1·
      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 😂

    • 257m@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      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.

      • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        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
  • 257m@lemmy.mlOP
    1·
    1 year ago

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

  • Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee
    1·
    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!

  • QuazarOmega@lemy.lol
    0·
    1 year ago

    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
      0·
      1 year ago

      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
        0·
        1 year ago

        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
          1·
          1 year ago

          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

          • QuazarOmega@lemy.lol
            1·
            1 year ago

            You took the words right out of my mouth.

            Btw that clip was hilarious, I hope I don’t come off like that often lol