Trouble identifying EFI partition to do timeshift restore

[Kobold]

@Septeract7

I am already booted into a live USB and have my external timeshift drive connected and recognised.

I have no experience with EFI stuff, but i can recommend to use the Timeshift GUI and not the CLI mode for a restore. The GUI gives side by side a compare Window, which partitions it wants to overwrite… it should be pretty clear after that.

I hope you have a fresh snapshot and don’t restore a old snapshot… otherwise you could face even more issues.

@Septeract7

Now I do not know anymore which files I changed. But I do have timeshift backups!

If you have created a fresh snapshot right before you playing around with this pacnew files, then everything should be fine.

You have 2 options, restore your snapshot (recommend to use GUI) or just open dolphin and click on “modified” to list the last modified files first, at /etc/

You may can open Dolphin to get a overview and copy+paste manually the old unmerged files (Timeshift backup files), to get it working again.

@Septeract7

This resulted in me not being able to log in after reboot (my password and fingerprint simply stopped working).

This sounds to me like this file:

/etc/passwd

Check for recently modification and maybe replace it.
This pacnew file showed up in February this year.

Edit:
If im right and it is this file and you want still assist or need more infos to Merge this file.

Look at the comments in the annoucement Topic from February:

[Stable Update] 2024-02-21 - Kernels, KDE, VirtualBox, Calamares, ROCm, Firefox, Thunderbird

When you have several (older) pacnew files, because you never maintained your .pacnew files yet. And you need still help with them, you better create your own Topic. In a Announcements Topic should mainly this discussed which is in direct relation to this Stable update and older pacnew files are no part of it… or is this a new file? Btw. your screenshot not showing which one is pacnew and which is the old version. The simple answer, without any details… for sure you should manually merge, but …

or this here:

Question about passwd.pacnew

Hello everyone, I am currently looking at the .pacnew files after the update. A passwd.pacnew was created in which there is only one line: root:x:0:0::/root:/usr/bin/bash In my file it says at the beginning: root:x:0:0::/root:/bin/bash Just to be sure, I want to ask if I should change the line root:x:0:0::/root:/bin/bash to root:x:0:0::/root:/usr/bin/bash There is also a lot more text (40 lines in total) in my previous passwd file. I’d better leave them all, right? Bes…