Hey guys,
so i did an update today, it installed KDE 5.27...i accidentally clicked on yes regarding the theme migration and it destroyed my rice (i thought it would just change the things, not activate them).
I didn't want to make all the necessary changes right now and wanted to just reboot into a snapshot from before the update and deal with that stuff later...
Interestingly, after that update i cannot boot into ANY snapshot anymore. Regardless of how old or new it is, regardless if i use the fallback or lts kernel...I know that i could boot into snapshots yesterday BEFORE the update just fine.
I then made a new manual shapshot with the update in place (so as it is right now) and can't boot into that one aswell...so yeah my snapshots are broken somehow. I really really want these to work... can someone help me out here?
Booting a snapshot will not revert your theming anyway, as snapshotting the home folder is not default behavior in Garuda Linux. .bak files were created in your .config folder. You can restore them to restore your old theme.
Yeah i remembered that aswell...wasn't really awake when this happened (thats why i wanted to revert it in the first place)
I now riced everything back to what i wanted, so i don't really need to revert anything.
But i need to have my snapshots working again. Those saved my butt more than a dozen times already and i need the peace of mind that i can revert to a working system at any point
I also have this issue on 2 of 3 machines I tested it on, one of which I installed the OS (KDE-Lite) only 4 days ago. (it was an immediate issue) Let me know if want any info from me to compare, if that's helpful, such as garuda-inxi, grub configs, etc.
It's not a specific snapshot that doesn't work. It's all snapshots, regardless of how old or new, that don't work.
So as of right now, i cannot use the snapshot functionality and cannot rely on my system backups. So if i were to brick my installation right now, my system would be lost and i could not restore any snapshot.
I didn't try "booting" into a snapshot from commandline because i don't know how. You said i should RESTORE a snapshot from TTY and that is something i don't want to do right now as my installation is working right now and i don't want to brick it by restoring snapshots that don't work.
To summarize:
My installation works fine, i can boot it, i can use it, 100% works. But if i go into the Snapshot section in grub when booting, and trying to boot in ANY of the snapshots (even ones i made just seconds ago on my working system) i get the "bailing out bcs sbin/init missing" error.
I can then easily reboot into my system and use the current installation, but i don't have access to ANY of my snapshots, making the backup / snapshot system broken right now.
That stresses me out because i need to have a working snapshot system in the case i break my installation at some point...
until this is fixed, back up your installed packages via comm -23 <(pacman -Qqett | sort) <(pacman -Qqgg base-devel | sort | uniq)
This will not save an installation but at least allows you to go back to a similar state. I suggest making regular non-btrfs backups of your home directory too.
I am doing regular back-in-time snapshots of my home directory and i am also doing lists of all my installed packages.
Maybe i try what @bluepower said, which is basically the same as @BluishHumility (both are blue, coincidence? ) and just restore one of those snapshots from my working system and see if it fixes it...
yeah alright, so restoring a snapshot from my working system DOES indeed work and does NOT brick my boot lol
So that means i have 95% working snapshots, that will save me in any case that allows me to still access my system. If i break that however...i cannot access this...
I assume i would still be able to boot into a live-usb of garuda and chroot into my install maybe? And restore the snapshot from there? But that is certainly a much more in-depth process than simply chosing the last working snapshot in grub.
@bluepower - sadly restoring a snapshot did not repair the grub-functionality
Yes, you can always restore a snapshot from the live system. That would be sort of the “original” way to restore a snapshot. The method is described here: Snapper - ArchWiki
It obviously more clunky than the grub-btrfs system where you just choose a snapshot from a menu and it’s done, but it is a good backup plan. You can also use Btrfs Assistant from the live environment.
Regarding the actual issue, I cannot figure out how to reproduce this issue. The /boot/grub/grub-btrfs.cfg posted above does not contain any obvious clues to me, all those snapshots look pretty much normal.
This seems especially odd to me:
I brought up a fresh KDE lite installation yesterday, and booting to snapshots is working out of the box. I even have non-standard root subvolumes set up and Grub still automatically finds the snapshots and booting to them works fine.
Now that I think of it, I guess I did reinstall Grub and regenerate the configuration file on the back of changing the default subvolumes. It seems like a long shot, but have you tried doing that yet?
That was not me I didn’t install KDE lite 4 days ago.
sudo grub-install --no-nvram
Gives me the following error:
Installing for i386-pc platform.
grub-install: error: install device isn't specified.
Updating grub said it found 28 snapshots, memtext86+ and my linux images and fallback…But this problem persists beyond a kernel update that i made via garuda-update that then did an grub-update aswell…
That didn't fix it either. But i stumbled across something that may or may not be relevant...
doing snapper list showed me no snapshots after my deletion-oddesey was done. But grub-update said it found two snapshots... It said N/A for both the name and description. The snapper gui doesn't show those two aswell but the grub menu when booting does show those two.... But grub-update did find them and said it put those into the menu....maybe those two contain the borked sbin/init file ?
How could i go about deleting those two if even snapper itself doesn't find them