System lost power while updating the kernel

To be more precise, for whatever reason my infinite wisdom chose to update this mid lecture, deciding the 70%+ battery power was fine. This was of course until the battery died around 65%. Packages downloaded and some time after updating the kernal i saw it die. I rebooted it, and it informed me the kernel was missing and it was unable to boot. thought oh this is alright i just need to rebuild them.

Noticed i had no efi partition at all according to the lsblk -f command and the existing fstab, just a swap partition (cheers 4GB of ram), just one big ext4 eos one (that contained the efi/pacman.conf i replaced)

Today i got a new live ISO, chrooted in and went oh i will just use eos-update. Only according to eos-update (and pacman) the following repo definitions must be added to /etc/pacman.conf. I believe i did this, and i found what i think was a fresh eos pacman.conf and replaced the old one with it, only to have the same message. I wondered since i already had the packages downloaded i could just do dracut-rebuild. this prints 1 line (building initramfs for linux (6.13.6-arch1-1), but is forever (for hours as i forgot to turn it off and went out) stuck on this line .

Any advice? can clean boot as its only got a bit of lecture material on it, but would rather fix it without reinstaling it.

System is a v, old dell 1564-9138 laptop. Can get specific logs as requested.

Thanks in advance!

This i dont understand…

Pacman updates in 3 phases. Download and check sigs. 2. Updating 3. Processing.kernel etc.

Powerdown at first phase is just reipdate stuf. At second phase broken packages…3. Kernel image not processed…

If its a new install better reinstall…, at chroot you have to check pacman isnt broken.. you might use pactools like pacrepairdb but first paccheck --list-brokeb --sha256sum , if i aint wrong…