No, that’s a file manager. The underlying operating system was most likely DOS or CP/M, although those two were not really operating systems. They would load an executable into memory and pass full control of the computer onto it, and then when the application ended, they would reload the command interpreter into memory, or at least, if the executable hadn’t messed things up so badly that only a reboot would still offer solace.
But that said, UNIX is much older than either DOS or CP/M, and was also much more powerful from the beginning, because it was multitasking and offered concurrent multiuser access via time-sharing.
The above all said, at least you were able to boot into your installed system again now.
You weren’t going to let me have that were you lol!
Anyway does the chroot environment execute commands on the local system? Because those tools vanished after I rebooted. They must have just been installed on the liveUSB instance
Nope, because I’m going to claim the solution here.
Well, if you installed those packages inside the chroot, then yes. But the chroot only applies within the terminal. The rest of the system was still running off of the USB/CD/DVD, and so if you used the GUI package manager, then that will have worked only in the live environment of the USB/CD/DVD.
Well hang on before I pin that medal on you, because this is going to be a gold lol.
I installed mtools in the chroot environment and I see the EFI partition there if I launch gparted from within chroot environment.
Its already flagged as ‘boot’ and ‘esp’.
Now what?
I haven’t tried that yet. Still in the live USB instance.
But I did launch gparted and then ran the install in the chroot environment, and the “!” is gone next to the EFI partition.
Should I do anything else, or just reboot?
Or am I supposed to go back and do all the steps here:
Nope same thing.
If I boot Manjaro, it brings up a grub menu with “UEFI Firmware Settings” as the only option. If I pick that, the PC shuts off
Its weird because all the files are there. I can get to a grub prompt and list and see all the filesystems
It is weird indeed. Well, maybe someone else can pitch in now, because I’m out of ideas and it’s closing in on 02:00 in the morning over here, so I’m going to offline for the night…
Yeah it looks like the updates didn’t take on the actual PC.
When I rebooted the EFI partition is in error again.
How to reinstall those packages (mtools, dosfstools) on the actual PC, not the live USB instance?
Maybe I can drop to a # prompt off the grub menu?
If I reinstall Manjaro off the liveUSB, will I lose all the programs I’ve installed since the previous installation? And will it wipe out say extra programs in /usr/bin and the like.
Surely that would fix the problem. That’s been proven, since the live USB instance works fine. I’m just trying to determine what will be lost by reinstall
If you format the partition, then yes. But it’s been so long since I installed Manjaro that I don’t even know whether it offers you the option of installing without formatting. This was a new computer anyway, and I’ve never had to reinstall since I first installed it in 2019.
OK I’m farther than ever before!
I now see Manjaro as an option off the grub menu.
However when I select it, it starts to boot Manjaro. Then I get scrolling:
[FAILED] Failed to start OpenVPN service for Server
[FAILED] Failed to start OpenVPN service for Server
[FAILED] Failed to start OpenVPN service for Server
[FAILED] Failed to start OpenVPN service for Server
[FAILED] Failed to start OpenVPN service for Server
[FAILED] Failed to start OpenVPN service for Server
[FAILED] Failed to start Samba NMB Daemon.
It then hangs there and goes no further.
Are these services even necessary? I’m not networked at all on the PC other than accessing the internet.
Why in the world is openvpn service so important?
Why can’t I just remove the blinging thing. I’m not even a server! I don’t want to be.
And I was just thinking, “What I need is to spend 3 or 4 days just trying to get the computer to work like it always has!”
Yeah that’s making progress in life. Hooray.
What if I were to boot off the live USB, then copy/backup these directories off the hard disk recursively, to a Passport drive:
usr
bin
opt
Then reinstall Manjaro off the live USB. Then copy/overwrite these directories back to the new system?
Everything else is in the separate /home filesystem already.
Would that not then just reinstall the system, and leave you with everything loaded still intact? Why would that not work?
