Everything suddenly broke, won't boot properly

ERROR: Root device mounted successfully, but /sbin/init does not exist.
Bailing out, you are on your own now. Good luck.

sh: can't access tty: job control turned off
[rootfs /]# _

This is all I get when I boot up my laptop now. I had been using Manjaro for a year now. I was just using it normally one day when suddenly all OS related things (file explorer, settings, shortcuts, terminal) stopped working, instead throwing a “file not found error”.

I foolishly thought rebooting would fix the issue, but now I can’t even get into the OS, getting the above error instead.

I didn’t use sudo on anything before this happened and the last thing Pacman updated was some gnome-theme(?) package (but I doubt this is what caused the error).

A live boot still works, and I can access all personal files off the disk (they aren’t corrupted). I’ve tried generating an fstab, which didn’t fix it, and I’m currently running badblocks through the live boot, which hasn’t brought up any disk errors yet (at 10%).

It’s an older laptop (4 years) and it sometimes makes a short whirring noise (do SSDs do that? If not, it might be the CD tray, for some reason), so a hardware fault is a possibility, but I’d like to make sure before I go buying a new drive.

Please, does anybody know what could have caused this? Does anyone know a possible fix? This issue is bothering me greatly. Thank you in advance.

what does ls -l /sbin/init show?

check if sysvcompat is installed pacman -Q systemd-sysvcompat

/edit there’s already a thread about it

1 Like

The command shows

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 Sept 21 10:10 /sbin/init -> ../lib/systemd/systemd

The package is installed already