Sorry for the length upfront, but there’s a lot of context here for why this is such a tricky issue.
While the title is descriptive enough, there are several complications specific to my machine that make the “straightforward” solutions impractical if not impossible.
Firstly, this is a laptop. It’s supposed to support a refresh rate of 144Hz by default, and it did run at that rate for a long time. Unfortunately, it has since sustained some damage which renders that refresh rate useless. Only a small sliver at the top of the screen works at that rate. I’ve managed to get my login manager and desktop running at 59.93 Hz instead (any higher doesn’t work), but that leaves the GRUB screen a mostly black thing that i just hit enter in to get to the working parts. Due to the kernel no longer booting, I cannot get past this screen.
Secondly, my WiFi card is horribly supported. Some MediaTek thing which i don’t remember the details of anymore. Got so bad that if network activity ever dropped to 0kbps for too long it would just kernel panic. I have an external USB wifi card now for this purpose, which is covered by the rtl8192eu dkms driver. I also removed the driver for my built-in card, as its mere existence was still causing issues. The thing with the new driver is, it fails to compile on stock arch and mainline but not the zen kernel. Essentially, booting any other kernel is out of the question if it will require internet.
I have been trying to load a snapshot from the grub menu, which i was able to reach using the tiny sliver of working pixels as a guide. As i cannot see the menu itself, i assumed the default kernel to be selected would be the zen kernel, but if that is the case then i cannot even use the zen kernel to boot a snapshot. Attempting to use the stock arch kernel (which i did confirm to be the arch kernel using uname -r) does technically boot, but then proceeds to complain that it can’t find /sbin/init even though the filesystem mounted successfully, leaving me with a rescue shell. Despite the insistence of the support template that i provide garuda-inxi, I hope you can understand that it’s impossible in this case.
Leaving grub alone during the boot process and thus booting the default zen kernel normally seems to produce an error, but due to the screen issue i cannot make it out clearly. I can only barely see the tops of the letters, and from that i can kinda make out the words “not found” at the end. I have seen images of not found errors in grub screens, so i know that there’s a lot of other text further down which i simply can’t see.
I attempted to connect an external monitor, and while the backlight breifly shut off as if acknowledging the connection, it did not proceed to switch to it. I tried to look for some keyboard shortcut to force using the new monitor, but Fn+F5 and Fn+F8 didn’t work (those who said it worked had HP laptops while I have an Asus so idk why i thought it would work). I tried closing the lid and this also didn’t switch. I tried closing the lid soon after turning the laptop on and this also didn’t work. All other monitor switching methods for grub seem to involve editing config files which is not possible from a rescue shell as even though it claims that the filesystem mounted successfully, i can’t chroot into it. Claims it can’t find /bin/sh.
Somehow this’ll have to be solved from the rescue shell and/or grub without being able to see menus. Or i guess it could be the end for this laptop, which would be somewhat tragic but understandable given it’s age. Ideally i’d rather not have to bin it, of course.
Hoping for an honest assessment of this situation.
