System will not boot after update (made some progress but now I'm stuck)

General system Newbie
1

My issue started with an update being interrupted, like a lot of similar posts.
After some research, I 'chroot’ed in, ran ‘bootctl install’ and ‘reinstall-kernels’.
Currently, when I boot up my computer:

  • I don’t get a choice of kernels (as opposed to before the interrupted update)
  • The boot process stops near the end, and I am put into “emergency mode”

I believe the bootloader fails while trying to mount the partitions. The last line before stopping is to do with mounting /home, and looking at the ‘systemctl’ output, I can see that mount.efi failed.
More specifically, the LOAD column has ‘load’ as it should, but the two columns immediately to the left
(I forgot the names) have ‘failed’.

Anybody know what’s going on here?

1 Like
2

Maybe you should have ran another update first when you chrooted and then ran bootctl install and reinstall the kernels.

3

In fact I did that as well. Forgot to mention it

4

Updated information: Looking at the output of ‘systemctl’ it seems that nearly everything is normal, but mounting ‘/efi’ failed. The LOAD column contained ‘loaded’ like everything else, but the ACTIVE and SUB columns showed ‘failed’. I know it’s not the most helpful info, but there you go.

5

Fire up your EnOS flash drive and run fsck on your /efi and / partitions. If that doesn’t fix it make a picture of the boot output so somebody can make sense of what the problem is

6 
sudo fsck /dev/nvme0n1p1 (/efi):
fsck from util-linux 2.39
fsck.fat 4.2 (2021-01-31)
/dev/nvme0n1p1: 24 files, 80361/255496 clusters

I’m not sure that anything happened. I checked the manual page and it’s supposed to give an exit code indicating the result. I’ll try booting now tho.

7

Same result. Also, I don’t have access to a phone, so I can’t really send a picture.

I’m kind of wondering though, would there be an easy way to just reset my /efi partition? Like if there was a command that sort of generated what needs to be stored there, I could just format the partition and run that. Full disclaimer: I have no idea what I’m talking about, but it would be convenient.

8

That’s basically what bootctl install and reinstall-kernels do. The former will install systemd-boot to your esp partition and the latter regenerates kernel images and modifies boot loader entries.

Can you post the boot logs with journalctl -b -1?

1 Like
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I see. Thanks for the info :slight_smile: Here’s a pastebin link of my logs https://pastebin.com/wNScbNW5

10

Are these logs for the failed boot? Because I couldn’t seem to find the error you mentioned in your first post. journalctl -b -1 will obtain the log for the previous boot; journalctl -b -2 will get the logs for the boot before that and so on.

11

You know, I’ve decided a fresh install would be easier. I have about 200 megabytes of stuff I care about, which I can back up to google drive or something. And anyway, I’ve been wanting to try out Nix OS.

I will say though, EndeavorOS has been my smoothest Linux experience so far, despite the claims that Arch-base stuff “breaks easily”.

1 Like
12

Other than that little fiasco with grub, there really hasn’t been any cases with Arch breaking. Even then, it could be easily fixed with an live ISO and quick chroot.

Anyway. Good luck and enjoy distro-hopping.

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