System broken during update process. Now can't boot

Support Kernel
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1

I can’t boot into my system. Help! :frowning:

My system
Manjaro KDE installed in a usb stick, with LUKS encryption. Partition table: MBR. Has only a /home and /swap partition.

What is currently happening:
When I boot into the system, after decrypting with my LUKS passphrase, I’m now shown a log screen that says:
error: file /boot/vmlinuz-5.7-x86_64 not found. \n error: you need to load the kernel first. \n Press any key to continue...
Not much else is possible here. When I press any key, I’m taken to the screen that has the options for booting into Manjaro KDE (With the memory test, etc). If I choose to enter into Manjaro, the same black log screen is shown again, and so on.

What led to this happening:
I was updating the installed software with “Add/Remove Software”, which I hadn’t done in about 2 months. There were about 400 packages that needed to update, and the download was about 1.6GB. At some point during the update, the screensaver got activated due to inactivity. When I tried to log back in to the session, I was met with a black screen that said something along:
"The log in screen is broken. To return to your session, open a new terminal (Alt,Ctrl,F1) and enter the command loginctl session-unlock 2. Then return to your session with (Alt,Ctrl,F2). "
I performed the said instructions, but the terminal session just hanged. After pressing Enter I was taken back to the previous black screen.

I then decided to turn off the computer by holding the power button.

Is there any explanation for this catastrophic failure? Better yet, a fix?

2

I’m now accessing the usb stick from a different linux system, and I can still decrypt the LUKS partition. All my personal files seem to be intact. So only problem is I can’t boot from it anymore.

3

The Kernel 5.7 is not installed. Version 5.7 is EOL. Use Version 5.4 LTS or 5.8 Stable.

Or Install it: Manjaro Kernels - Manjaro

4

You should not wait that long between updates.

Manjaro is a curated rolling-release distribution, which means that updates are tested longer and bundled together. So there won’t be too many updates, but then you should still update your system whenever an update becomes available.

If for whatever reason you don’t want to do this, then perhaps Manjaro is not the right distribution for you, and then you should be looking for a fixed-point-release distribution instead.

That is always a bad idea, and especially so in the middle of an update. If you interrupt an update, then you are left with a partial upgrade, and without a working kernel, because the kernel images are what gets removed at the start of the update process, and the new kernel images are installed only at the end of the update process.

Boot up from the USB stick in live mode and open up a terminal window. In this terminal window, issue the command… :arrow_down:

su -

Next, chroot into your installed system, like so… :arrow_down:

manjaro-chroot -a

It will attempt to autodetect your installation. If you are presented with an output that looks like 0/0, hit 1.

Next, resume the update… :arrow_down:

pacman-mirrors -f 5 && pacman -Syyu
mhwd-kernel -i linux54
update-grub

Now leave the chroot environment… :arrow_down:

exit

It should be safe to reboot your system at this point.

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