I am not the most experienced with linux, and really wish I had the forethought to take some pictures. This is what I experienced today, and could really benefit from some guidance.
Today, I decided to do a system update with pacman -Syu. There were some keychain issues that I resolved with, to the best of my memory the following:
rm -rf /etc/pacman.d/gnupg
pacman-key --init
pacman-key --populate
# i was running into errors still so I updated the keyring packages
pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring endeavouros-keyring
pacman-key --refresh-keys
The last command had a lot of errors, but afaict this is part of the normal process as it tries various sources for updated keys.
This finally fixed the issues with pacman -Syu, so I rebooted.
I posted fine, but when booting through systemd , the system was unable to mount Efi. systemctl status efi.mount in emergency mode showed a message unknown type of file system [vfat]. I rebooted again just to check, but this time I was unable to post.
After some finagling, which include resetting UEFI settings, clearing CMOS, and flashing a new updated UEFI, it seems I am only able to boot cleanly after I clear the CMOS. Throughout this process, there was a lot of hanging on screen freezes, whether it freezing after allowing the system to auto-boot, freezing when booting to a specific target from UEFI, that required me to shut down the pc by holding the power button, which I’m afraid damaged something.
Finally, I was able to follow another thread here and realized that somehow, the efi partition and root partition uuids’ had changed as they were displayed in blkid. Updating /etc/fstab, /etc/kernel/cmdline, and verifying the *.conf entries in the mounted efi partition worked, and I’m now able to boot.
The questions are this:
- What can cause a UUID to change like this? These drives have honestly been through the multiple reinstallations, and a windows installation, so it’s very possible that this is some weird behavior due to residual efi partition? Not sure if that’s possible
- Could anything I did here create a persisting hardware problem? I have removed the cmos battery from my machine’s motherboard in the meantime since I do not have any UEFI options set, but I’m considering seeing if I can get this RMA’d and would like to avoid something like this in the future.
Any insight would be appreciated