System not booting after running out of space during update

Support System Updates
3

Possible causes…:backhand_index_pointing_down:

  1. Too many old packages in the package cache under /var/cache/pacman/pkg. Better clean that out completely.

  2. Too many btrfs snapshots. Remove most of them. You probably ran out of space if you have timeshift-autosnap-manjaro installed, which by default creates a snapshot both before and after an update.

Regardless of which of the two causes applies, you probably also no longer have a kernel installed, and thus no way to boot.

This is the result of how the update procedure works. Once the packages are downloaded but before the updates are applied, the kernel(s) and initramfs are deleted, and only at the end of the update procedure, they are recreated and the boot loader gets updated to point to the new kernel(s).

Advice… :backhand_index_pointing_down:

Manjaro is a (curated) rolling-release distribution and should be kept up-to-date. If you cannot (or won’t) do that, then you would be better off running a so-called point-release distribution.

Tips… :backhand_index_pointing_down: