Since last year, I’m always installing Manjaro on USB sticks (Samsung Fit usually) and this has worked fine with two PCs and two laptops…no complaints.
The trouble started when trying to boot up a laptop I haven’t used in a few months. It’s a touch screen (has always worked with Manjaro) and while it was booting I was wiping off the fingerprints. Manjaro booted with some kind of “screen error” so I assume it was due to me cleaning off the screen during the boot process. So I rebooted and the desktop came up, but it seemed to be frozen… So I rebooted again, this time the desktop did NOT come up.
Then I tried booting the fallback kernel or whatever it’s called–that WORKED. I don’t really know what I’m doing at this point, but I figure OK I need to upgrade the system, so I did pacman -Syu
and I thought it was working… but then I look down and see a ton of “read only” errors. Now I’m thinking… maybe I just need to remove the write protection? I tried a couple of commands on another PC to remove the write protection–nope it still won’t boot. Now I’m wondering if my system is bricked/gone…
I can’t mount the USB, the error is something like “no superblock” so I try a half dozens commands to find the superblock. Apprenly I have no superblock. No secondary superblock. fsck doesn’t work either.
fsck from util-linux 2.36
e2fsck 1.45.6 (20-Mar-2020)
ext2fs_open2: Bad magic number in super-block
fsck.ext2: Superblock invalid, trying backup blocks...
fsck.ext2: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdc
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a valid ext2/ext3/ext4
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2/ext3/ext4
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>
or
e2fsck -b 32768 <device>
/dev/sdc contains `DOS/MBR boot sector' data
I would think OK maybe it’s damaged. The usb gets REALLY HOT, I would not buy plastic SanDisk storage again… Anyway, I’m not giving up yet because the USB will still boot to the Manjaro menu that lets me choose the kernel or memory test, but once I choose the kernel it gives me an error…
“error attempt to read or write outside of disk ‘hd0’” and after a few seconds I get dumped to “emergency shell” which as far as I can tell is totally useless.