Manjaro wont boot because of GDM and NetworkManager

[Yiannis128]

I was trying to fix an error that I had encountered with flatpaks and decided to use the command:

sudo mv /var/run /var/run.bak

From what I understand, the content of the folder are initialized at boot so I don’t think that detail matters but im including it for context.

I also ran:

sudo NetworkManager

sudo systemctl start NetworkManager.service

Because I thought that the issue was related to that by browsing some random forums…

I have no clue what I did but there’s an infinite loading screen and also here is the output when I press ESC

[anon88624618]

/var/run is a vital part of the system. Do you know how to chroot and revert what you did (I’m asking, because manjaro-chroot is currently buggy)?

[Yiannis128]

No I don’t… can you run me through the steps please? Also from what I understood /var/run was a symlink to /run thats why I didnt think it was important…

[anon88624618]

Do you have a live iso of Manjaro at hand?

[Yiannis128]

Yes. Thankfully I keep one just in case I need it.

[anon88624618]

Ok, good. Please boot into it and issue:
sudo manjaro-chroot -a

[Yiannis128]

OK I have done that… I am presented with this prompt.

[anon88624618]

Perfect. Please post the output of:
ls -la /var

[Yiannis128]

It shows my filesystem… I think I should rename the run.bak symlink back to its original name… but I will await confirmation as to not mess anything more up…

[anon88624618]

Now you can see that /var/run is no longer symlinked - that’s a problem. Let me do a quick research…

[anon88624618]

The other issue I see here is the folder /var/run which doesn’t exist in my installation. Is it possible that you created that folder? If so I assume it’s safe to remove it and revert run.bak to run by:
mv /var/run.bak /var/run

[Yiannis128]

Oh yeah… of appears that folder must have been created after I had renamed the symlink

I will remove it and rename the symlink back and see what happens

[Yiannis128]

Thank you for helping me. This fixed it, I should be more careful when messing with the OS next time around.

[anon88624618]

Well, that’s Linux - constantly learning something new