Arch (EndeavourOS) broke. What did I learned

Preamble

Around 3 and a half years ago I bought a Lenovo Legion without an operating system. I do not remember if exactly from beginning but at least shortly after buying it EndeavourOS "sticked" :-) and remain the running OS on the machine.

The deed

Running some updates and rebooting brought me to a black screen with a blinking cursor. I had this in the past when the pacman cache was not cleared and the OS could not boot due to the lack of space. Assuming the same prepared for the chroot only to find out that this was not the cause... here enters "troubleshooting mode". As this post remained in draft for more than 2 months some of the details blurred out. What can I say is that finally I have managed to find the culprit, but did not managed to troubleshoot the system and installed anew. Nevertheless I have learned a few important things that enlarged my "Linux-Know-How" and I am very happy. I am also confident that the system was "salvageable" but the efforts were bigger than setting the system clean. Most probably it had to do with how the Nvidia drivers were "talking" to the kernel. An old way of communication was superseded and my installation being so old could not clean up properly in order to cleanly apply the new way.

What did I learnt

  • edit grub entry add a "3" to the end of the linux line and boot to cli. What a wonderful thing! This allows to enter the system without graphics and to try to troubleshoot from there. It is a bit easier to do than arch-chroot if the problems are with the display system. One has access directly to the OS from the CLI and can troubleshoot from there.
  • arch-chroot. This is chroot made easy: just mount the relevant partitions and chroot to the system!
  • you can restore arch packages to a certain date. Arch based systems allow to restore the "package situation" from a certain date (in the past). I should forward investigate if this is restoring also the affected config files but for sure is a handy thing in case something goes wrong with an update.
  • check out your rsync backup. Yep I did not backed up the "dot-files". Just learned that rsync is not backing up by default the "dot-files". Make this check when backing up with rsync!

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