Have a nice day, everyone!
I have basically the same problem as the thread opener. Differences: LUKS-protected ext4 instead of his btrfs, SATA SSD instead of NVMe.
My EndeavourOS with linux-zen kernel, GRUB and Plasma wanted to update ca. 185 or 135 packages (incl. kernels) via yay (not pacman -Syu or eos-update --yay), so I let yay do its work yesterday, about 1 or 2 weeks after the former system update. I did not do anything while that huge system update run yesterday. After completion, yay urged me to do a reboot. I made the mistake of complying.
Since then, EndeavourOS fails on the booting procedure step “mount boot/efi”. This is true for linux-zen and standard linux kernels as well as their respective “recovery” and “fallback initramfs” options. All of them declare vfat an
“unknown type of file system”.
Then I am hinted to run “systemctl status boot-efi.mount” and after that “dmesg(1)” (or similar), which only throws an error, while “dmesg” produces more terminal lines than the screen can cover. I did a few camera photos, if someone wants to read the error messages. Basically, it is
"boot-efi.mount: Failed with result ‘exit-code’ […] status=32/2a […] where: /boot/efi",
“File /var/log/journal/[…]/system.journal corrupted or uncleanly shut down, renaming and replacing”,
“unknown type of file system [vfat]”.
Important: The same (allegedly) faulty vfat/FAT32 esp boot partition still works for another Linux distribution on the same SSD – GRUBbing everything fine there. It is only EndeavourOS which complains about the “un-mountable” esp boot partition.
For about 15 hours altogether, I desperately tried to fix that problem, e. g. per EOS install USB drive, GParted partition check/repair, another partition manager’s repair function, manually copying maybe-necessary files to what I suppose could be the correct “/boot/*” or “boot/efi/*” path, and so much more. But I have not found a fix. I do not know how to (successfully) chroot, or whatever to do, as I am still quite newbie.
The affected PC is not my machine. That EndeavourOS partition working is essential. I have to fix it until Tuesday, 31.10.2023, because I will travel away on that evening. Then the PC owner will miss a working system. Please, help this pitiful Linux newbie fled away from the Windows darkworld.
Sincerely
Tako