Borked my system, Urgently need support

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
19

That was, in fact, the solution. I will provide an in-depth guide on what I did to both bork and fix it in case somebody else (or I, once again) runs into the issue.

Preface

I stupidly updated both my laptop and PC at the same time (using yay). Even more stupidly, I excluded the ICU package from updating (I did this to deal with conflicting packages), which prevented both systems from:

  1. Utilizing pacman
  2. Actually booting the system

Not quite sure how, but I also borked my kernel while updating. It’s not my first time doing that (I should probably fix that), so luckily, I already knew what to do. I grabbed my trusty, rusty USB with Ventoy and booted into an EndeavourOS image circa last year. (All commands provided show what I did on the PC, but the only difference on the laptop was having different partitions.)

Steps to Fix It

  1. List partitions:
lsblk
  1. Mount the proper partition (the one that actually has Linux on it):
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
  1. chroot into the mounted partition:
sudo arch-chroot /mnt
  1. Reinstall the Linux kernel:
sudo pacman -S linux

Running pacman is where I experienced my second major hiccup of the day—receiving an error somewhere along the lines of:

“You uninstalled ICU, dumbass.”

So, as per ChatGPT, I “manually” installed ICU by copying the files from “Download From Mirror” on this page.

Basically, I just extracted it on the live USB and copied it over to the root of the borked system. There should be a bin folder—this is what you actually move. Then just “write into” for all, “overwrite” for all, and if you get an error about expecting a folder when it’s a file, skip it. (I know there’s probably a few Linux sins in there, but I was desperate.)

That got pacman working, so I could properly update, but then I couldn’t boot. (There’s an image of the issue I was experiencing in the old forum post.)

After a few more hours of troubleshooting, as per the forum post, I found that the solution was as simple as running:

sh

CopyEdit

pacman -Syu $(pacman -Qnq) --overwrite "*"

as root while arch-chroot-ed into the borked system.

Hopefully, this will help someone. Moral of the story: Don’t exclude packages while updating. Also, I hate Electron.

Thanks for the help and support y’all :3 :heart:

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