excuse me if I cannot post my garuda-inxi and have to resort to screenshots, but since I cannot boot I’m afraid this is the best I can do.
I couldn’t update since my root partition (50gb) was apparently full.
So I deleted some snapshots, cleared cache and orphans via the Garuda tools, then tried rebooting and… I cannot boot anymore, and the five snapshot I have do not work as well!
This is what I see if I try to boot linux-zen or linux-lts (I have both installed, keeping LTS as a fallback):
Boot from a live USB, muont your system partition and free-up/move as much space as possible, if this is really the problem.
From the live USB, once the system is mounted, you should also be able to access your snapshots in the Btrfs Assistant and delete some old snapshots.
If that’s not enough, you should consider chrooting from the live USB into your system and, having made some space, you should be able to update or just reinstall the kernel, if that’s the problem.
Before updating, you could free up a lot of space with:
sudo pacman -Scc
(well sudo is not needed when inside a chroot)
Ops, I just noticed:
You could try chrooting anyway and updating, now that the disk space should be available.
I suppose I could try… could you please tell me how to do that correctly? I only chrooted once and it was following exact instructions. I do not really know what I’m doing and wouldn’t want to do any more damage.
Thank you both, @filo and @SGS!
In the meantime I recovered the old instructions that @NaN kindly gave me at the time and tried garuda-chroot -a, but:
╭─garuda@garuda in ~ as 🧙 took 48ms
[🔴] × garuda-chroot -a
mount: /var/lib/os-prober/mount: mount(2) system call failed: No such file or directory.
dmesg(1) may have more information after failed mount system call.
grub-probe: error: cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/sdd1. Check your device.map.
grub-probe: error: cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/sdd1. Check your device.map.
==> ERROR: No Linux partitions detected!
The root partition is indeed mounted via Dolphin, i can navigate it.
Thank you @nepti, I’m just waiting to check if this is indeed the only real solution.
That would be really sad, given the long time spent in installing, fixing, tuning, adapting the system.
If I’ll need to reinstall:
is it worth it to keep / and /home separate? or is it an unnecessary complication? (if you do not install the exact same version of the exact same distro maybe keeping the /home intact would be a problem anyway)
the / must be at least 100Gb? (pretty huge, on my dual boot system)
In the end, I think maybe it is my fault: I’m a real noob in the Linux world and maybe choosing an Arch base rolling release wasn’t the wisest decision, even if I’m loving the Garuda approach (rolling, but assisted).
Maybe if I’ll have to reinstall I’ll give Mint or Fedora or Zorin a chance, to see if they are more suited to this noob stage of my Linux life.
But I’m still hoping to remain on Garuda!
In case you still want to go the chrooting route, there is a button in the Garuda Welcome on the live USB to do that.
Otherwise, detailed instructions to do it manually are provided here:
I see from your previous inxi that your /dev/sda has a MBR, so you should follow the relevant instructions in the tutorial if you want to try reinstalling the GRUB as well (which won’t be a bad choice).
I think I managed to chroot and I garuda-updated the system twice, with an error at the end but mostly succesfully updating packages it seemed.
:: Starting full system upgrade...
there is nothing to doRunning in chroot, ignoring command 'start'
Running in chroot, ignoring command 'start'
Failed to connect to bus: No such file or directory
Failed to start transient service unit: Transport endpoint is not connected
I deleted a strange directory on sda2 but outside /root that was taking up space (I think it was an old backup, since it had a name that I assigned to specific backup/snapshot in the past).
But… when I rebooted the result was the same as before.
I’ll do it again maybe trying to reinstall GRUB, even if I’m afraid to mess up my Windows 10 installation as well.
EDIT: W10 partition seems to stil boot up regularly, so I’m really way to mess it up. I feel stuck.
Nope: I tried garuda-updating from chroot several times, always with the same results.
I still cannot boot nor restore any snapshot, even if I now have 7.8Gb of free space on the root partition.
No, Windows is on sdc, so you can spare the heart attack - this time.
Still, if I don’t find a way to reboot, nuking everything will be the only “solution”, since unfortunately updating from chroot seems to be ineffective.
I’m really way about reinstalling GRUB, not to invalidate the opportunity to boot Windows via sdc…
Whether you need a separate /home depends on your usercase. Since you obviously don’t mount /home into any other Linux installations, this would be unnecessary.
My suggestion would be the same as mentioned above.
Back up all personal data and reinstall garuda. Either with more space for root or you use the entire SSD for the installation (like @bro already said). Check beforehand whether there is a bootloader or other important stuff on the SSD.
Whether you try to fix your garuda or whether you want to reinstall it, that is your decision
@Ezahn, switching distros is not the solution. It really doesn’t matter which distro you are using if you don’t make backups. Any and all OS’s will likely fail or require reinstallation at some point, (if you use them long enough). A static distro may be less likely to fail during updating, but it usually requires reinstallion at some point.
If you want to avoid reinstalling regularly your best route is to use a rolling distro and keep full backups of the system and your user data.
Without backups you will eventually suffer a breakage at some point, regardless of the OS in use. BTRFS snapshots are a great recovery method, but they are not foolproof, (as you have now have discovered).
A 120GB SSD can be purchased for ±$20 nowadays. Keep each OS on its own individual drive and you can hopefully avoid some pitfalls. Keep regular backups and you’re golden.
If you don’t keep backups, it really doesn’t matter which OS you use, you will end up having to reinstall at some point. It’s just a matter of how painful recovering your system will be. Backups generally make digital life painless. Unfortunately most people always have to learn that fact the hard way.
Thanks so much @nepti, @Bro and @tbg for taking the time to help and counsel.
I’ll try some more times to repair the installation, if only to learn something, and if everything fails I’ll reinstall, maybe with a single partition as suggested.
Regarding backups: wise words and I totally agree. I have a very recent backup of most of the home partition (all the documents), but I confess that I’m struggling to find a suitable backup strategy and software for both system and documents.
At the moment I just manually copied documents, pictures etc. to an external hdd.
On Windows I also use iDrive as cloud backup but I couldn’t make it work on Linux (even if I installed the relevant package)
If you have a strategy and software / cloud to suggest I’m all ears!
