Recently I had several system freezes when awaking from sleep where only login screen appeared with mouse cursor movement but all mouse/keyboard actions were unresponsive, so I had to force shutdown with power switch. After that my computer would only boot to firmware BIOS screen.
For two days I have been trying to use a live USB to arch-chroot into my system in an attempt to find a cause for this problem. I am no expert in using live arch system to correct what seems to have been a corrupted update. I eventually managed to get pacman repopulated so that it would update keys and run a normal update so I now have the 6.11.8-arch1-2 kernel. However, the regenerated initramfs images seem to be unreachable and my bootup ends with a return to the BIOS screen. The only improvement - possibly because I got bootctl to modify my loader.conf so that the list of boot choices is now complete, whereas before I only had the option of boot to firmware.
I have previously installed a basic arch system for a file server on my local LAN and used systemdboot following the archwiki instructions. However, examining my broken desktop system that had a recent version of Endeavouros running on it, I cannot understand the tree structure of the esp that was created during the original installation. Or at least what I can see of it from chrooting into the system.
On my laptops, also running endeavouros, one has a boot/ directory with the esp inside it so there is a /boot/efi/EFI directory containing what I presume are the files for the grub loader. A more recent installation on my other laptop using systemd-boot has the EFI/ random-no/ and loader/ directories under efi/ while boot/ only contains the intel-ucode image file. It doesn’t seem to me as if there is a uniform tree structure for the esp or perhaps it depends on the hardware?
My desktop failure to boot seems to be due to missing link to the compressed kernel image - vmlinuz-linux. The menu on booting show the randomseed number then the name of the 6.11.9-arch1-2 kernel followed by “unsupported”. Obviously my update using pacman - according to the log - had installed the previous kernel version. Should I attempt to reinstall the kernels? If so, I’d be grateful for suggestions as to which commands to use from chroot.