Update broke virtual machine

Support Virtualization
1

I updated my Manjaro XFCE virtual machine(VirtualBox) that I do a lot of programming assignments on, and it broke on me. During the update, the virtual machine went black, and I ended up closing it. When I opened it, I got the error:

     error: file '/boot/vmlinuz-5.10-x86_64' not found. 
     error: you need to load the kernel first
             press any key to continue...
    Failed to boot both default and fallback entries

After a few seconds, I get a grub menu that lets me choose the kernel in the advanced options, but every single kernel option (5.10.2-2 and 5.4.85-1) gives me the same error.

From what I have read, I have to boot into some sort of live CD image of Linux to fix this. I don’t really understand how to do this in VirtualBox, though.

At the very least, I would like to be able to retrieve the /home/ directory from the install. That’s the main thing of value from the VM.

Thanks in advance for your help.

About my install:
Virtualbox 6.1.16
Manjaro XFCE

2

Download the last stable ISO of Manjaro XFCE and add it as “optical drive” in Storage section, that is roughly the start point.

3

I just typed the same and a bit more than @Lolix , so I’ll now also put it here:

In the storage option of your defunct VM add the iso that you installed from (or a more recent one) to the IDE controller - just as you did when you created the VM
In the system option you can choose the boot order and enable/disable the virtual devices
This will let you boot the live cd and you can proceed with your repair as normal.
probably:
manjaro-chroot -a
finish/re-run the update
perhaps also reinstall and update grub

4

In the Live CD, I ran

manjaro-chroot -a
sudo pacman -Su

and i got

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] y
(111/111) checking keys in keyring                                                          [#####################################################] 100%
(111/111) checking package integrity                                                        [#####################################################] 100%
(111/111) loading package files                                                             [#####################################################] 100%
(111/111) checking for file conflicts                                                       [#####################################################] 100%
error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)

`

5

Why not use
sudo pacman -Syu

and
sudo pacman-mirrors -c $your_country -m rank
or
sudo pacman-mirrors -f
before that?

With an interrupted update, you’ll have some files that the package manager doesn’t know about yet.
In this case you can safely choose to overwrite those/force the installation.
How to do that I don’t know right now.
But there are (sadly) many posts re this here on this forum - just look around/search
how to tell pacman to overwrite/force the install in the case of conflicting (because already existing) files.

6