Chroot help Please

Well, I am stuck trying to fix my system but I can’t chroot.

This is what I am doing and I can’t seem to get to first base

lsblk -f
NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
loop0 squashfs 4.0 0 100% /run/archiso/airootfs
sda iso9660 Joliet Exten EOS_202503 2025-03-19-11-30-07-00
├─sda1 iso9660 Joliet Exten EOS_202503 2025-03-19-11-30-07-00 0 100% /mnt/efi
│ /run/archiso/bootmnt
└─sda2 vfat FAT32 ARCHISO_EFI 67DA-AABF 6.3M 96% /mnt
/mnt
/mnt
nvme0n1
├─nvme0n1p1
│ vfat FAT32 6B2F-109C
├─nvme0n1p2
│ ext4 1.0 endeavouros 88347989-ffd4-43c0-a480-d35363d8cbf6
└─nvme0n1p3
swap 1 swap 0f166b91-ce60-4c1f-bab6-0affffd1da11
[liveuser@eos-2025.03.19 ~]$ sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
[liveuser@eos-2025.03.19 ~]$ sudo cat /mnt/etc/fstab
cat: /mnt/etc/fstab: No such file or directory
[liveuser@eos-2025.03.19 ~]$

I am following the wiki on Chroot.
What am I doing wrong?
Thanks for your help

Well you didn’t show the obvious, what IS under /mnt? What IS behind door #2 (reference to american game show)?
Why don’t you just do a ls /mnt and see if it looks like Linux /?
If it does, then keep exploring, what’s under /mnt/etc?
It seems obvious there is not fstab…but look for it, just in case.

Hi, well I used the command sudo cat /mnt/etc/fstab per the Wiki and I get “no such file or directory”. I guess I thought that means I didn’t do something right.

So I ran ls-1 /mnt

[liveuser@eos-2025.03.19 ~]$ ls -1 /mnt
arch
boot
EFI
loader
shellx64.efi

This is probably completely over my head. I really don’t understand what is going on here with chroot. Do I need to mount another file? I am reading about chroot, but I just don’t understand the file table and what I need to mount.

That’s the boot disks EFI partition, so unless that’s what you were going for, you got the wrong one ;0 I should have caught that from the first post, but I just got up (and never as sharp when still sleepy).
nvme0n1p2 is your linux root partition (I would guess, really you should know your own system better than I would?).

Well, I have had such a stable experience with EOS, I never had to lean the file system. This is my first Linux distro and have been on for several years. I have fixed a few things along the line, but this one seems pretty serious.

I have tried to mount the nvme0n1p2

sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p21 /mnt
mount: /mnt: fsconfig system call failed: /dev/nvme0n1p21: Can’t lookup blockdev.
dmesg(1) may have more information after failed mount system call.

Is not the same as /dev/nvme0n1p2, be careful.

Well that helped LOL. I will see how it goes trying to recover my photos
Thanks very much

Well that’s the kind of thing I’d do at 1:53 am (my local time)…

2 Likes