About a month ago, beginning of march, I noticed I had a lot of available upgrades (some 300 packages). Maybe foolishly I just pressed “Upgrade all” or whatever it said…and after that my system doesn’t boot. Unfortunately I’m not competent enough to sort it out myself, and I don’t even know where t…

You should be able to restore the last working snapshot with Timeshift, then reboot. From there, update with pacman on the command line, not pamac (the graphical “Add/Remove Software” utility). For reference, the pacman update command is sudo pacman -Syu

iI would load the last working (timeshift) snapshot. If the system is running, try the update via tty.

The most useful place to look for problems with an upgrade is the pacman log: /var/log/pacman.log

If I’m on a snapshot and chose to install a bunch of packages (upgrades or new ones), where would they go? Will an altered snapshot become a newer snapshot, or the default boot option or just forgotten when I reboot? /BA

Couldn’t find much that caught my attention in /var/log/pacman.log, but maybe the failed udevd service mean something to someone? [2026-03-07T17:54:19+0100] [ALPM] upgraded yakuake (25.12.1-1 -> 25.12.2-1) [2026-03-07T17:54:23+0100] [ALPM] transaction completed [2026-03-07T17:54:29+0100] [ALPM] run…

Not exactly my area of expertise, but if the log ends there, it looks as if it started mkinitcpio then stopped. If that’s the case, then my guess is that something died before the necessary files were created in /boot. I’m sure more expert people can say more.

[image] BarbaArtist: [2026-03-07T19:52:11+0100] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] Job for systemd-udevd.service failed because a timeout was exceeded. [2026-03-07T19:52:11+0100] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] See "systemctl status systemd-udevd.service" and "journalctl -xeu systemd-ud evd.service" for details. [2026-03-07T19:…

[image] BarbaArtist: "journalctl -xeu systemd-udevd.service" for details. While you’re on it could you please post the output of this command too? Trying to fix the installation you might run into the same problem again.

I kind of glanced over the snapshot portion, and went to the default fix. But this is also another option. And this is only If you have increased the snapshot limit beyond 3. The default only gives you 1 usable snapshot, and it’s lost on a single restore. This default of 3 is changed in: /etc/ti…

This might be of help, if you haven’t already seen it: [image] [HowTo] Recovering from an interrupted update/upgrade Tutorials Difficulty: ★★☆☆☆ So you couldn’t wait until the update process had completed and you went for the reset/power button, didn’t you? s…

[image] BarbaArtist: If I’m on a snapshot and chose to install a bunch of packages (upgrades or new ones), where would they go? Nowhere, because snapshots are read-only.

Need help after failed upgrade

Support System Updates

BG405 4 April 2026 18:06 10

This might be of help, if you haven’t already seen it: