Is it possible to recover the installation?
I have a dual boot which works, but i re-imaged the EndeavourOS partition from a previous image (due to a botched update) and then this happened.
I should note I have a dual boot with Windows 10,
which was set up previously by EndeavourOS to “install alongside”. The dual boot works, but after I choose EndeavourOS, this happens.
Could you boot up your live usb and post the output of:
sudo parted -l
and
efibootmgr
?
Thank you for getting back to me as quickly as you did. This is the first chance I’d had to reply.
That last entry “Model: Samsung SSD 970 EVO 500GB (nvme)” is the drive with Windows and Endeavour OS dual boot.
liveuser@eos-2024.01.25 ~]$ sudo parted -l
Model: ATA ST4000VN008-2DR1 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 4001GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1049kB 4001GB 4001GB ntfs Data msftdata
Model: ATA ST2000DL003-9VT1 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 2000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 1049kB 2000GB 2000GB primary ntfs
Model: ATA ST3000DM007-1WY1 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 3001GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 135MB 3001GB 3000GB ntfs Basic data partition msftdata
Model: Kingston DataTraveler G3 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdd: 3874MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 1049kB 3874MB 3873MB primary fat32 boot, lba
Model: Samsung SSD 970 EVO 500GB (nvme)
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 500GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1049kB 106MB 105MB fat32 EFI system partition boot, esp, no_automount
2 106MB 123MB 16.8MB Microsoft reserved partition msftres, no_automount
3 123MB 84.1GB 83.9GB ntfs Basic data partition msftdata
5 84.1GB 85.1GB 1049MB fat32 boot, esp
6 85.1GB 141GB 56.0GB ext4 endeavouros
7 141GB 418GB 277GB ntfs Fast Drive msftdata
8 418GB 500GB 81.5GB ext4 Linux Home
4 500GB 500GB 523MB ntfs hidden, diag, no_automount
[liveuser@eos-2024.01.25 ~]$ efibootmgr
BootCurrent: 0009
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0003,0000,0009,0001,0002,0006,0007,000A
Boot0000* Windows Boot Manager HD(1,GPT,cec35240-5c10-4cb5-899b-50ebc6170f5f,0x800,0x32000)/File(\EFI\MICROSOFT\BOOT\BOOTMGFW.EFI)57494e444f5753000100000088000000780000004200430044004f0042004a004500430054003d007b00390064006500610038003600320063002d0035006300640064002d0034006500370030002d0061006300630031002d006600330032006200330034003400640034003700390035007d00000049000100000010000000040000007fff0400
Boot0001* ST2000DL003-9VT166 BBS(HD,,0x0)0000424f
Boot0002* ST3000DM007-1WY10G BBS(HD,,0x0)0000424f
Boot0003* Linux Boot Manager HD(5,GPT,c2c15111-5138-4d18-9e31-29bf8caa1e9d,0x9c91790,0x1f4000)/File(\EFI\SYSTEMD\SYSTEMD-BOOTX64.EFI)
Boot0006* Samsung SSD 970 EVO 500GB BBS(HD,,0x0)0000424f
Boot0007* ST4000VN008-2DR166 BBS(HD,,0x0)0000424f
Boot0009* UEFI: KingstonDataTraveler G3 1.00, Partition 1 PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x14,0x0)/USB(1,0)/HD(1,MBR,0x54a000,0x800,0x737000)0000424f
Boot000A* KingstonDataTraveler G3 1.00 BBS(HD,,0x0)0000424f
Thanks for the outputs!
Boot up your live usb and make sure to have internet connection.
In the following, if you will be getting any error messages at any step, please stop and post them back here.
Now let’s try chrooting into your installed system:
sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p6 /mnt
sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p5 /mnt/efi
sudo chroot /mnt
Inside chroot, update your system fully:
pacman -Syu
This step may be unnecessary but won’t hurt. Reinstall your kernels: linux, linux-lts etc. (what you have)
Pay attention to the output in the terminal, specially from dracut and make sure that the initrds have been generated successfully.
Run lsblk -f to get the UUIDs for your system’s partitions.
Compare them with the ones in /etc/fstab and make sure they match.
If all is well so far, quit chroot by typing exit followed by enter. Reboot.
Report back here in case of success or failure.
Thanks again man. Well a serious error on the very first command;
[liveuser@eos-2024.01.25 ~]$ sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p6 /mnt
mount: /mnt: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/nvme0n1p6, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.
dmesg(1) may have more information after failed mount system call
I’m assuming it’s a bad image (weird, because it should be fine), so I’m re-imaging again with an older image.
In the meantime -FYI this is how I copy the image back (after booting into a liveboot USB)
sudo gunzip -c /pathtoimage/imagename.image.gz | dd of=/dev/nvme0n1p6 status=progress
and this is how I make the image in the first place;
sudo dd if=/dev/nvme0n1p6 conv=sync,noerror bs=64k status=progress | gzip -c > /pathtoimage/imagename.image.gz
in case you may know any issues that may arise from using this method.
Oh one thing I should mention is I resized the partition (bigger) since the image was taken. Usually this means when you re-image, it just makes the drive think it’s smaller than it is, and it’s usually fixed easily (I forget, it’s been a while since I’ve been in this situation, I was just going to resize it again in gparted)
You could try using Gparted (or other partition manager included in the live iso) to run a filesystem check on that partition.
With Gparted, you could right click on the partition, choose Check and apply the operation in the toolbar.
Oh shoot I noticed the problem - it’s the other way around, this drive has become SMALLER since the last image…
[root@EndeavourOS ~]# sudo gunzip -c /run/media/liveuser/Hitachi/DiskImages/EndeavourOS/EOS-02_Software.image.gz | dd of=/dev/nvme0n1p6 status=progress
55944801792 bytes (56 GB, 52 GiB) copied, 590 s, 94.8 MB/s
dd: writing to '/dev/nvme0n1p6': No space left on device
109445233+0 records in
109445232+0 records out
56035958784 bytes (56 GB, 52 GiB) copied, 596.693 s, 93.9 MB/s
Aaaahhhh… is there any way around this situation? I don’t want to have to resize the partitions again, it involves moving down a bunch of other partitions and it’s kind of worrying…
The thing is, I know for a fact that the actual data on the drive at the time does NOT take up the full space of the partition, so most of that partition backup should be empty space… that hopefully may mean there’s a way around this?
It’s cool - unless you know of a way to edit the image file, I can just bite the bullet and move all the partitions again, restore, shrink back, and take a new image that’s of the new size…
I am afraid I am a bit at a loss on this one.
If you are not in a hurry, perhaps you could wait a bit and see if others may have some suggestions.
If not, it looks like you are in for some partition management.
All good - your help let me suspect the re-image went badly and try again, and indeed it was. It’s kind of my problem now XD your help was fantastic and much appreciated.
Well Endeavour OS breaking during its update in the first place wasn’t, that’s for sure. Hopefully after I re-image, it doesn’t break again in the next attempt to update…
If it does, I’ll ask here about how to fix it this time around. The desktop manager was all broken, the display was cloned on all 3 monitors, low res, and no task bar, had to do everything with CTRL+ALT+T and typing commands.
Since you are replacing your root partition and have a separate home, as a last resort you could reinstall the system keeping your current home. That is doing a manual install and mounting your current home at /home without formatting of course.
In this way you could keep all your personal data and user configurations but you would need to reinstall all the other pieces of the software you had before plus redoing any possible system-wide modification that you may have done previously.
Ok did the repartitioning and the image copy seemed to go ok. But the system kind of got as far as last time, with some errors (as in the photo) but different errors, I should’ve taken a photo of the screen. It was saying that it couldn’t mount specific directories. So I’m going back to your instructions.e
I got a lot further, but lsblk didn’t work
[root@EndeavourOS /]# lsblk -f
lsblk: failed to access sysfs directory: /sys/dev/block: No such file or directory
I looked into /mnt/sys/ and it is indeed empty.
I skipped the update since that’s exactly the reason I’m here (the update broke, and part of the update was downloading an absurdly huge 22gb file, seemed to be related to electron? This kind of file size seems preposterous in regards to Linux libraries, I can’t help but feel something is wrong)
Well since I can’t get further I’ll run the update anyway and leave it while I post this here.
If that is electron25, I would remove it before updating.
This has been causing issues for several users recently.
Also, you could perhaps skip lsblk and run blkid to get the UUIDs of your partitions and compare them to those in /etc/fstab.
Thanks for your quick replies 
The update failed, pretty sure mirrors are out of date from what it’s saying. I’ll update and try again. Relevant output here for reference;
error: failed retrieving file 'kscreen-6.0.2-3-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst' from sydney.mirror.pkgbuild.com :
error: failed retrieving file 'python-jinja-1:3.1.3-1-any.pkg.tar.zst' from sydney.mirror.pkgbuild.com :
warning: too many errors from sydney.mirror.pkgbuild.com, skipping for the remainder of this transaction
warning: failed to retrieve some files
error: failed to commit transaction (unexpected error)
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.
Well electron is something that came down with something else, but it doesn’t seem to be installed now so all good.
blkid just immediately quit to the prompt, no output!
Well I’ve updated the mirrors and trying again - can you believe all these prompts I have to press ENTER to?
[root@EndeavourOS /]# pacman -Syu
:: Synchronizing package databases...
endeavouros is up to date
core is up to date
extra is up to date
multilib is up to date
:: Starting full system upgrade...
:: Replace appstream-qt with extra/appstream-qt5? [Y/n]
:: Replace attica with extra/attica5? [Y/n]
:: Replace bluez-qt with extra/bluez-qt5? [Y/n]
:: Replace breeze with extra/breeze5? [Y/n]
:: Replace frameworkintegration with extra/frameworkintegration5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kactivities with extra/kactivities5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kactivities with extra/plasma-activities? [Y/n]
:: Replace kactivities-stats with extra/kactivities-stats5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kactivities-stats with extra/plasma-activities-stats? [Y/n]
:: Replace karchive with extra/karchive5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kauth with extra/kauth5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kbookmarks with extra/kbookmarks5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kcm-wacomtablet with extra/wacomtablet? [Y/n]
:: Replace kcmutils with extra/kcmutils5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kcodecs with extra/kcodecs5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kcompletion with extra/kcompletion5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kconfig with extra/kconfig5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kconfigwidgets with extra/kconfigwidgets5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kcontacts with extra/kcontacts5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kcoreaddons with extra/kcoreaddons5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kcrash with extra/kcrash5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kdbusaddons with extra/kdbusaddons5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kdeclarative with extra/kdeclarative5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kded with extra/kded5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kdesu with extra/kdesu5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kdnssd with extra/kdnssd5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kdsoap with extra/kdsoap-qt5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kfilemetadata with extra/kfilemetadata5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kglobalaccel with extra/kglobalaccel5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kguiaddons with extra/kguiaddons5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kholidays with extra/kholidays5? [Y/n]
:: Replace ki18n with extra/ki18n5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kiconthemes with extra/kiconthemes5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kidletime with extra/kidletime5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kio with extra/kio5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kirigami-addons with extra/kirigami-addons5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kitemmodels with extra/kitemmodels5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kitemviews with extra/kitemviews5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kjobwidgets with extra/kjobwidgets5? [Y/n]
:: Replace knewstuff with extra/knewstuff5? [Y/n]
:: Replace knotifications with extra/knotifications5? [Y/n]
:: Replace knotifyconfig with extra/knotifyconfig5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kpackage with extra/kpackage5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kparts with extra/kparts5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kpeople with extra/kpeople5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kpty with extra/kpty5? [Y/n]
:: Replace krunner with extra/krunner5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kservice with extra/kservice5? [Y/n]
:: Replace ktexteditor with extra/ktexteditor5? [Y/n]
:: Replace ktextwidgets with extra/ktextwidgets5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kunitconversion with extra/kunitconversion5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kwallet with extra/kwallet5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kwayland with extra/kwayland5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kwidgetsaddons with extra/kwidgetsaddons5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kwindowsystem with extra/kwindowsystem5? [Y/n]
:: Replace kxmlgui with extra/kxmlgui5? [Y/n]
:: Replace libkcddb with extra/libkcddb5? [Y/n]
:: Replace libqaccessibilityclient with extra/libqaccessibilityclient-qt5? [Y/n]
:: Replace modemmanager-qt with extra/modemmanager-qt5? [Y/n]
:: Replace networkmanager-qt with extra/networkmanager-qt5? [Y/n]
:: Replace nvidia-installer-common with endeavouros/nvidia-inst? [Y/n]
:: Replace plasma-framework with extra/libplasma? [Y/n]
:: Replace plasma-framework with extra/plasma-framework5? [Y/n]
:: Replace plasma-integration with extra/plasma5-integration? [Y/n]
:: Replace prison with extra/prison5? [Y/n]
:: Replace purpose with extra/purpose5? [Y/n]
:: Replace qqc2-desktop-style with extra/qqc2-desktop-style5? [Y/n]
:: Replace solid with extra/solid5? [Y/n]
:: Replace sonnet with extra/sonnet5? [Y/n]
:: Replace syndication with extra/syndication5? [Y/n]
:: Replace syntax-highlighting with extra/syntax-highlighting5? [Y/n]
:: Replace threadweaver with extra/threadweaver5? [Y/n]
resolving dependencies...
:: There are 2 providers available for dbus-units:
:: Repository core
1) dbus-broker-units 2) dbus-daemon-units
Enter a number (default=1):
:: There are 2 providers available for qt6-multimedia-backend:
:: Repository extra
1) qt6-multimedia-ffmpeg 2) qt6-multimedia-gstreamer
Enter a number (default=1):
Might be looking at just reinstalling as you suggested a few posts ago.
Those are a lot of packages. Plasma got upgraded to 6 a few days back so that is why you are seeing all those replacements.
I hope all this is not in vain. Let’s see where we go from here.
This is a similar error to just before when I tried to update, so I updated mirrors. But still getting this error;
error: failed retrieving file 'knotifications-6.0.0-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst' from sydney.mirror.pkgbuild.com :
error: failed retrieving file 'libqxp-0.0.2-11-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst.sig' from sydney.mirror.pkgbuild.com :
warning: failed to retrieve some files
error: failed to commit transaction (unexpected error)
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.
(can paste more output if needed)
See if commenting out (or removing) this mirror from the /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist will help.
It keeps doing this, I ran it through twice, there’s a TONNE of this output that I practically have to hold the ENTER key through and let it spam for like 10 seconds… no joke. Here’s the last bit of it;
error: wayland-protocols: missing required signature
:: File /var/cache/pacman/pkg/wayland-protocols-1.33-1-any.pkg.tar.zst is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)).
Do you want to delete it? [Y/n]
error: webkit2gtk: missing required signature
:: File /var/cache/pacman/pkg/webkit2gtk-2.42.5-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)).
Do you want to delete it? [Y/n]
error: webrtc-audio-processing: missing required signature
:: File /var/cache/pacman/pkg/webrtc-audio-processing-0.3.1-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)).
Do you want to delete it? [Y/n]
error: welcome: missing required signature
:: File /var/cache/pacman/pkg/welcome-24.5-1-any.pkg.tar.zst is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)).
Do you want to delete it? [Y/n]
error: wget: missing required signature
:: File /var/cache/pacman/pkg/wget-1.24.5-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)).
Do you want to delete it? [Y/n]
error: xfsprogs: missing required signature
:: File /var/cache/pacman/pkg/xfsprogs-6.6.0-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)).
Do you want to delete it? [Y/n]
error: xterm: missing required signature
:: File /var/cache/pacman/pkg/xterm-390-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)).
Do you want to delete it? [Y/n]
error: yay: missing required signature
:: File /var/cache/pacman/pkg/yay-12.3.1-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)).
Do you want to delete it? [Y/n]
error: zip: missing required signature
:: File /var/cache/pacman/pkg/zip-3.0-11-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)).
Do you want to delete it? [Y/n]
error: failed to commit transaction (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature))
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.
Any chance we could move forwards, or just re-install?
Try:
pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring endeavouros-keyring
and
pacman -Syu
If nothing works, I am afraid reinstalling will save you some time and effort.