After cleaning up pacman, Manjaro doesn't start anymore

Probably good.
Beyond that … theres other little commands or utilities to accomplish it.
Old wisdom says just avoid bleachbit … but I have heard more than once its less destructive or maybe even safe now, as long as you avoid a couple options.

2 Likes

For now I just increased the disk space for my Manjaro installation and I will stick with cleaning the cache only since I’ve learned that orphaned packages apparently don’t occupy too much space and you can just leave them be.

But thanks for all your input and recommendations. It seems for some things I need to use sudo such as installing new packages, but I will be more thoughtful in the future about using commands I don’t know or understand.

2 Likes

What is really weird though, I have a fresh new installation of Manjaro now and yesterday it was working and I didn’t change anything with it, only did 2 recommended updates and now today, it seems I have the same problem again, after selecting Manjaro in the grub screen, it gets stuck with the Dell-logo screen. So I assume there must be a problem with one of those 2 updates? Right now I need to participate in meetings so I cannot investigate but as soon as I have time, I will see if I can undo those two updates and get it to boot again.

I also found this:

So in the end, it might just be a random incident, maybe there was a Windows update that is now causing trouble. I might try this “changing the kernel” but not sure how exactly to do it, trying to figute it out.

Update: This answer in the post I linked above has helped me. Now many restarts, also booting into Windows and back into Manjaro, have worked fine.

Also, I checked before what haveged is and even though I don’t know how entropy and random number generators affect the booting process, it has helped and I hope the system keeps working for a long time now. Gotta get into that backup strategy next.

2 Likes

I have run into this issue after changing the kernel to 5.8. I recently did a fresh manjaro install on 5.8 as well and this is the default behavior for me out of the box.

Alt+F2 and Alt+F1 always works and gets me to my login screen. I don’t know what 5.8 is doing different from 5.4.

I did try the haveged method before,

sudo pacman -Syyu haveged
sudo systemctl enable haveged --now

but the issue persisted for me.

I am going to try haveged again today, maybe itll work on my fresh install.

I still wouldn’t trust a non-distro-and-DE-specific tool such as this. Threre are some differences between filesystems & directories on different distros plus config. file & maybe directory differences between desktop environments even on the same distro.

Too many people have gotten into trouble using such utilities. :wink:

Good luck! If you find out more, please let me know!

The system if failing to boot because it cannot abide to the fstab rules.

After banging my head a lot, I found out this is due to the fs driver being missing.
In turn this happens because despite having updated the kernel (and so the relative modules version), grub was actually still loading the old one!

And last but not least this was happening because the EFI boot partition had never been properly mounted since the installation, and the system (from pacman to update-grub) had always kept writing to /boot which was just a stupid folder like any other.
This also ended up being responsible for random errors like this one.

Eventually I had to use manjaro-chroot from a live CD (after having mounted the right block device to the right installed manjaro folder) and update kernels and whatnot from there.
Then I killed with fire /boot/efi from fstab, and replaced it with the most mundane mounting of /boot possible.

1 Like

Isn’t mhwd-chroot actually the old one? manjaro-chroot is the one that is part of the Manjaro tools.

Does this mean that other tools used in Manjaro are not actively maintained by the current team?

No.
manjaro-chroot is really just a script that tries to automate chroot, so that it is easier for non-technical users. It doesnt really need to be ‘developed’ … it just had a bug that went unfixed because its not an often-used tool.

If a tool has a bug should the bug not be fixed by someone? What does the Manjaro team do if they do not maintain their tools?

Are you being purposefully difficult?
Yes … things get fixed as they are noticed or necessary. Otherwise your manjaro system wouldnt work.
I didnt say anything about it being standard operating procedure to ignore bugs.

I am trying to understand why a bug which is known has not been fixed. If that question is difficult then I am sorry.

1 Like

It was fixed.
No less than 2 people (myself included) submitted patches to that tool when the issue was raised.

Oh then this post is wrong?

That post is from 2 weeks ago.
The patch happened about a month ago.
So … depending on how quickly the package got into stable … then they could have been correct or incorrect depending on exact timing and branch.

Notice this was already noted in response to that post?

I did not notice. I am sorry.

No worries. I thought you were pulling my leg :wink:

I forgot to update you,
The haveged solution did not work for me. :frowning:

I suppose the chroot patch/discussion is unrelated to this.

I would like to post logs / maybe a screen recording of what is happening. Good idea?

This topic was automatically closed 15 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.