I was creating a new partition to move files over into (using KDE Partition Manager]. While that was happening, Manjaro basically baulked, kicked me out and all I could do was login via terminal. I rebooted, gets to the login screen, I put my password in and it gets stuck there.
I can still login if I press ctrl-alt-F2, but still stuck even after logging in and ctrl-alt-F1 back to logon screen. Although while in terminal, I can’t seem to navigate too well (even to my home directory), cd /home and an ls shows my user directory but I can’t cd into it. The file structure is still intact though as I can still get to files on the SSD using a Live USB.
I’ve tried creating a new account in terminal with useradd - the accounts there in the login screen, but that account freezes too.
Reinstall the following packages
sudo pacman -Syyu plasma-desktop kwin kf5
and
sudo pacman -S manjaro-kde-settings
with a systemctl reboot after each. Still stuck on the login screen.
Just wondering if there’s some other things I can try before I blow it away. I’m going to re-install Manjaro at some point anyway as with the last few updates hasn’t been too stable. The only thing is I need to find out where my Thunderbird profile is as the default location [home/user/.Thunderbird/] seems a little small from memory. Personal files are always backed up anyway, but just hadn’t figured a way of doing emails yet.
They are usually in $HOME/.thunderbird (all lowercase). If you’ ve done some fiddling and places them elsewere, you can always look into profiles.ini located that very same directory:
@freggel.doe
Thanks.
I started with the guide. Opened a Live USB, then terminal
manjaro-chroot -a
journalctl --boot=-1 --priority=3 --catalog | less
What part of the log am I looking for? It’s quite long even looking at the day it happened. And is there a way to extract the whole log from the terminal window to a file? Saving from File → Save Output As only seems to save the current screen view, not the rest of the log. Thanks
They are usually in $HOME/.thunderbird (all lowercase). If you’ ve done some fiddling and places them elsewere, you can always look into profiles.ini located that very same directory:
$ cat $HOME/.thunderbird/profiles.ini
Yep that’s the directory I looked at. I’m pretty sure I left it as default when I installed it so it should be there. Just that the size of the directory looks too small compared to old profiles and I know there’s a lot of emails with photos in them so I expected it to be bigger. I’ve made a copy of it anyway and stored it away safely.
I’d been creating/deleting a bare partition to use as a home directory. I did it a few times as I was trying to work out why when created I couldn’t access it as a user. So the partition was being created from Unallocated space (150GB) that I had made from shrinking the partition that had EndeavourOS on. From memory when it crashed, it was creating a partition again. File Manager dropped out, bottom task bar dropped out, then it went to a screen I hadn’t seen before which basically said I needed to login via TTY? (It was a similar screen to ctrl-alt-F2 I believe.
AFAIK TTYs use separate sessions, so i doubt it would have worked that way.
You can start a graphical session from TTY with startx.
Tried startx and it gives the following error:
xauth: timeout in locking authority file /home/schmidtp/.Xauthority
Then under
(EE)
Fatal server error:
(EE) Cannot open log file "/home/schmidtp/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.1.log"
xinit: giving up
xinit: unable to connect to X server: Bad file descriptor
xinit: server error
xinit: timeout in the locking authority file /home/schmidtp/.Xauthority
Forgive the output, I typed it from the other screen
I’m now wondering whether it’s actually a bug with KDE? I’ve had EndeavourOS on another partition and that’s done the same thing (stuck at login both EndeavourOS and Manjaro after recently updated). This time I wasn’t doing anything special when I rebooted (other than installing a few apps - Libre Office, Nemo) but then couldn’t log back in.
Although i am not sure which system it will base the path on while chrooting… Alternatively:
This is usually about file permissions, but considering your issue, i wonder if it was a premise of disk failure. You may want to check your drive’s health: S.M.A.R.T. - ArchWiki.
Sorry for the ghosting. I went back to temporarily using windows again as I need to get stuff done.
I did a SMART test on the SSD which came back with no errors so I guess that rules out SSD issues. And I did manage to rebuild my Thunderbird emails under Windows. Just have to copy them over to the new a new install.
While I want to learn, in the end I figured its just quicker and easier to reinstall it.