Need help getting out of a black screen

Support
1

Hey!

Quick Disclaimer: I’m new to Linux, Manjaro and to this forum, so I unfortunately don’t know much and also don’t know how to format something such that commands etc. are more visible.

So I’m relatively new to Linux and Manjaro and had no issues with it until yesterday. I think I installed too much software since it got to a point where everything started lagging or taking too long to respond, so I thought I should just reboot my laptop.

But after rebooting I landed on a blackscreen with a cursor blinking but nothing else being there. After long research in this forum I found a few things, which helped me out, namely:

-changing my runlevel to 3 in the grub-menu
the result: I’m getting booted to tty, in which I now have the ability to write console commands

-deleting my cache and logs using paccache, pacman -Sc and journalctl
the result: I freed up space and after rebooting I was even able to access my desktop again. Unfortunately this didn’t hold for long since the lags and long responses came again and on the next booting the same problem occured

Now I have much freed up space and after using df in the terminal it showed me, that everything is mostly used only 1% except my hard drive, which is 69% full (which was 97% before I started cleaning) and since those problems are still happening I’m honestly out of options of what to do, which is why I’m asking you for help.

I might have a clue on what might be the problem: When I boot up my laptop, there’s this screen in the beginning, showing me how much blocks are used. And although I don’t really know, what blocks are (I honestly assumed it’s the free space I have got and how much of it is being used) it does show me, that almost everything of it is being used right now. Unfortunately I don’t know how to resolve this problem since I couldn’t even find out what those blocks even mean.

Thanks in advance for taking your time. I really appreciate it!

-Daniel

2

Hi and welcome to the community. Please tell us more about your install. How much hard drive space is partitioned for Manjaro? Please open a terminal and run the following command and share the output;

df -h | grep ^/dev
3

That is just a message which shows the result of the filesystem check at every start. It is meant to solve simple file system problems.

Yeah, a full root filesystem can prevent booting, because you cannot write a single file on that disk. So keep sure that the partition which has the mountpoint / has always at least 20% free space (update cache not included). Consider to use a separate home partition, if you have not much space or expand the root partition.

4

Are you using btrfs filesystem by any chance?

If that is true you should know the filesystem requires regular maintenance otherwise the disk fill up.

Without any experience with btrfs I can only suggest you read the manpage

man btrfs

Packages available to assist

  • btrfsmaintenance which is a script and systemd timers and services to maintain your filesystem at a regular interval
  • btrfs-assistant a gui to maintenance
5

When your system fails, it usually leaves a log explaining why.