Filesystem keeps breaking for no reason

Alright so like, for some reason my filesystem keeps breaking? After a day or so of running the latest stable release of Manjaro XFCE using the latest stable linux kernel & yay, everything just breaks and won’t mount. Grub says the filesystem can’t be read and enters rescue, booting a livecd and trying to fix it has yet to give results. I’m pretty new to linux so I don’t really understand why this is happening, the only loose pattern I can see is it’s happened so far whenever I’ve installed Icecat through an AUR package (which takes ages because apparently building firefox forks through AUR takes ages).

I’m running Manjaro on an external SSD. Root filesystem is in Btrfs, boot is EFI. Installs are done following the architect installer with these settings. Please tell me whats going on and how to fix it I am losing it from continually reinstalling everything only for it to break and currently have no drives ready for snapshots/backups thank

Are you saying you boot from the ISO and you can’t read the root partition?

I have installed manjaro onto an external drive, after a few reboots the fs breaks, I open up a liveCD to try to fix the problem to no avail, I end up reinstalling manjaro. Rinse and repeat

also yeah no partitions can be mounted, after trying out a few things it keeps giving me different error messages narrowing down to a broken filesystem on both boot and root

Not the best way to start your Linux journey. If you really want to use a removable device please read these articles

Installing to a removable disk has some challenges - especially with booting - which may explain why you are dropped to a rescue prompt.

It is impossible to deduct what is stalling for you some ideas is - I have not thought any of them through - so take them for what they are - just ideas

  • your boot is mounting the device by name e.g. /dev/sdy1
  • grub is on your internal device and the external is not powered at boot time
  • your external device is cached and due to cache not flushed data becomes corrupted when tlp powers down your usb devices.
1 Like

:+1: Welcome to Manjaro! :+1:

What @linux-aarhus said and as you did not provide any technical information we can only guess what is going wrong and I’m guessing you might have a hardware failure (could be external disk breaking down or a dodgy USB cable)

  1. An inxi --admin --verbosity=7 --filter --no-host --width would be the minimum required information… (Personally Identifiable Information like serial numbers and MAC addresses will be filtered out by the above command)

  2. In your case to check any hardware failures on the disk itself, please provide the output to:

    smartctl --all /dev/XdY
    

Where X and Y denominate the device letters for your disk. If you don’t know, just provide #1 above and we’ll tell you what X and Y are… :wink:

1 Like

This point to a different problem. You are saying that in open your file manager, you navigate to the root partition in the external drive, and you can’t open it?

Please provide the output of lsblk -f after booting the manjaro ISO and connecting the drive with the installed system.

1 Like