Btrfs corruption?

G’day. I’ve had an oldish laptop (HP Elitebook 8770w purchased 2012) running Manjaro as my primary OS for a few years on a multiboot system (Manjaro and Win 10 on /dev/sda and Arch on /dev/sdb). During a recent large update I had to leave it running while I went out. When I returned some hours later the system wasn’t responding so I did a hard reboot.

It now will not boot up and shows the failures to start messages in screenshot below when attempt to boot into Manjaro (both 5.15.91-1-manjaro x64, the fallback initramfs, and earlier kernel 5.10.166-1). It also will not boot Win 10 any more, just gets to the spinning dots the reboots itself. It’s also much slower to get to the grub screen.

It does boot fine into Arch on the other hard drive. I suspected it was a hardware failure of the disk, but a bios disk scan said it was ok.

I’m wondering if it’s a filesystem corruption? But that doesn’t make sense why it won’t book to Win, does it?

How can I recover the data from each /dev/sda partition if I wanted to replace the drive or reformat and reinstall?

How to boot from USB into live Manjaro (for repair):

From there you can test to mount your btrfs volume.

  • readonly → broken :frowning:
  • readwrite → good :slight_smile:
  • Test all checksums of the mounted btrfs volume
    sudo btrfs scrub ... → better :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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It is very likely that the update was not finished. ( :mag: update suspend kernel initrd)
The system appears to have a kernel, but the initrd is faulty or the modules are missing.

  • Try booting (in GRUB) with the fallback initrd

This suggests that the grub config file is the problem

  • chroot into your system (be sure there to have /boot accessible)
  • rerun the update !
  • add a kernel (this sure will also recreate the grub config file :wink: )
    mhwd-kernel -i linux61

try to reboot

  • boot with live usb
  • mount the partition you want to rescue (readonly)
  • mount an external disk to save the data
    • to rescue files use rsync
    • to rescue a btrfs-volume use btrfs send
    • or use any other tool you know :wink:
    • BUT do not make a copy of a btrfs-partition (with the same UUID)

Thanks mate. I’ll give all of that a go now. Really appreciate your detailed response.

It’s easier and better in the long run to keep a Timeshift backup. It can be restored to any disk