Hi, this is my first post on this forum and you need to know this is my last resort.
I know this post is long and my english is not perfect, but I don’t have other options.
I have bee using manjaro for almost three years now, most of the time with no issue.
Last month I accidentally damaged the system, and I was forced to reinstall it. It was a mess. For some reason windows was on MBR and manjaro was on GPT and it was working fine for almost three years, but now I was not able to recreate it, boot loader kept installing the wrong way (from what I have read installing multiple systems on both GPT and MBR should be impossible, but I did it somehow not even knowing what I was doing)
So I created a backup, set UEFI to factory settings and reinstalled both systems on GPT…
…and that is the point where things started going sideways.
An update broke somehow something associated with graphic driver, and i did not manage to find what, because running mhwd command have erased all my data on that drive. (I know that is not what this command usually does)
I have reinstalled manjaro only to find grub rescue displayed on the screen. I have reinstalled grub from live usb and found that every time I reinstall grub from that iso It works only once. So I have tried to flash that usb using first usb imager i have found in official repository. Probably it had to be something with the faulty manjaro iso, (I don’t know what really have happen) but it have flushed on all connected usb devices, so that is my backup gone.
Anyway after installing manjaro from last release (previously I have tried to find the same iso i have used years ago to install manjaro on GPT while windows would stay on MBR, but I failed to do so) almost once a week boot loader of manjaro (I have two boot loaders on both disks) went missing leaving me with grub rescue. So every time I just chrooted from live usb and reinstalled grub. It was annoying but manageable (I have checked this disk a few times and everything seems to be ok, so most likely it have to be something with manjaro).
Today I did not manage to reinstall grub. Manjaro-chroot -a did not work (==> ERROR: No Linux partitions detected!). Neither manjaro partition nor the boot partition is mountable, so RIP my files again.
I have tried to fix that using fsck.
Before the problem was: “mount(2) system call failed: Structure needs cleaning.”
now: “mount(2) system call failed: No such file or directory.”.
Something different that could be meaningful: from time to time manjaro would just crash for no reason. It is much less frequent since I have installed video-nvidia-470xx.
I do not know what to do, I do not have time reinstall manjaro over and over.
I have lost so many time already. (I study IT so most of my work is gone) I am so frustrated.
Is any of this supposed to happen? Is it normal? What am I doing wrong?
It seems like the only thing that have worked for me was this stupid GPT-MBR system.
I was big fan of manjaro from the moment I have first installed it, but now I am torn apart
Is really this garbage from microS###t really superior if it stand on reliability?
I hate so much every their system after seeing how much is possible on linux but now I just do not know.
Considering you mention later you have two disks, i suppose you mean to have Windows on a disk with MBR, and Manjaro on the other with GPT. This is entirely feasible.
Here GPT and MBR are about disk partition tables. There is only one such table per disk (hence the name), and each disk uses its own. So you can very well have multiple disks, mixing MBR and GPT.
You may confuse this with MBR and EFI, in the sense of boot loading. Those are different methods of staring and booting entries for operating systems, and usually can’t be mixed without issues.
On a side note, there have also been numerous reports of Windows updates overriding the boot loader. Though your situation does seem more complicated.
Well, there are many occurrences of that discussed here, usually because of a kept unsupported kernel.
More than not what is “usually” does, rather definitely not what it can do: mhwd is a utility for managing specific packages, namely kernels and drivers. I highly doubt you lost all your data because of it.
Have you checked your drives’ health? If the file system begins behaving erratically, this is usually a sign of drive failure…
Please also provide information about your system.
Yeah, I didn’t know that back there. I’ve got windows on MBR disk and I have later installed manjaro with /boot/efi partition on GPT disk. It was the only stable configuration I ever got on current device.
The last thing I have done, was running mhwd while trying to reinstall graphics driver, then screen went black. After booting from usb I have found most of metadata missing.
smartctl output:
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Number: addlink M.2 PCIE G3x4 NVMe
Serial Number: CAF407020D7A00994222
Firmware Version: ECFM22.6
PCI Vendor/Subsystem ID: 0x1987
IEEE OUI Identifier: 0x6479a7
Total NVM Capacity: 512,110,190,592 [512 GB]
Unallocated NVM Capacity: 0
Controller ID: 1
NVMe Version: 1.3
Number of Namespaces: 1
Namespace 1 Size/Capacity: 512,110,190,592 [512 GB]
Namespace 1 Formatted LBA Size: 512
Namespace 1 IEEE EUI-64: 6479a7 303013700f
Local Time is: Wed Nov 9 22:53:32 2022 UTC
Firmware Updates (0x12): 1 Slot, no Reset required
Optional Admin Commands (0x0017): Security Format Frmw_DL Self_Test
Optional NVM Commands (0x005d): Comp DS_Mngmt Wr_Zero Sav/Sel_Feat Timestmp
Log Page Attributes (0x08): Telmtry_Lg
Maximum Data Transfer Size: 512 Pages
Warning Comp. Temp. Threshold: 75 Celsius
Critical Comp. Temp. Threshold: 80 Celsius
Supported Power States
St Op Max Active Idle RL RT WL WT Ent_Lat Ex_Lat
0 + 5.55W - - 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 + 4.49W - - 1 1 1 1 0 0
2 + 3.97W - - 2 2 2 2 0 0
3 - 0.0490W - - 3 3 3 3 2000 2000
4 - 0.0018W - - 4 4 4 4 25000 25000
Supported LBA Sizes (NSID 0x1)
Id Fmt Data Metadt Rel_Perf
0 + 512 0 2
1 - 4096 0 1
=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 27 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 5%
Percentage Used: 4%
Data Units Read: 41,041,053 [21.0 TB]
Data Units Written: 25,558,126 [13.0 TB]
Host Read Commands: 249,305,378
Host Write Commands: 110,977,615
Controller Busy Time: 771
Power Cycles: 2,454
Power On Hours: 5,219
Unsafe Shutdowns: 107
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 2,042
Warning Comp. Temperature Time: 0
Critical Comp. Temperature Time: 0
Error Information (NVMe Log 0x01, 16 of 63 entries)
Num ErrCount SQId CmdId Status PELoc LBA NSID VS
0 2042 0 0x6017 0x4004 0x028 0 0 -
# fdisk -l /dev/nvme1n1 ✔
Disk /dev/nvme1n1: 476.94 GiB, 512110190592 bytes, 1000215216 sectors
Disk model: addlink M.2 PCIE G3x4 NVMe
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: A45D7796-60C2-BE45-9F05-D761B58A0140
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/nvme1n1p1 250054656 454946815 204892160 97.7G Microsoft basic data
/dev/nvme1n1p2 2048 209717247 209715200 100G Linux filesystem
/dev/nvme1n1p3 209717248 249006079 39288832 18.7G Linux swap
/dev/nvme1n1p5 454946816 1000214527 545267712 260G Linux filesystem
Partition table entries are not in disk order.
There was vfat partition, but I have tried to reinstall grub a few times and formatted it. Now it is unallocated space.
nvme1n1p2 is partition on which manjaro is installed. It can not be mounted. I did not preform any actions on it besides fsck.f2fs
Even if both nvme1n1p1, nvme1n1p5 are on the same disk they are fully mountable and functional.
On nvme1n1p2 There is(or was) mostly the same software setup. I kept everything up to date, some drivers may differ but I am not able to recall evertything
This “tells” me that your system was not updated in quite some time. Stable has 5.15.76-1now.
Would aim to use only one sound server.
I would use at least a swapfile or zram-generator
If for some reason you have to use a lower version kernel, older, than the one you used to create the partition, things can get really messy. Mentioned too in the Warning section of F2FS - ArchWiki
Sorry if I was not clear about it: I have generated this info using live USB, I’m not able to mount my system partition and chroot into it. It’s mostly the same, but on my system I kept everything up to date.
you mentioned two disk, one with win and one with manjaro, but in the
there is windows and also manjaro installed on the same disk?
what file system are you using? is it encrypted?
fast boot disabled in bios - you may not have this option;
secure boot disabled in bios;
AHCI enabled in bios - if you have RAID, and switch to AHCI, you will not be able to boot into windows;
It is likely but, I don’t really remember. It’s more probable there was something wrong with my copy of a old manjaro iso I have been using back then. I’ve just remembered that I had to quickly compile some c++ code on that system, and it did not compile properly. It was not sequential: it randomly jumped from line to line, always in the same wrong order (sometimes it tried to disallocate memory even before it was allocated)
EDIT:
This tool seems to be really amazing, but sadly I had little to no use out of it.
After running “fix linux system” (or something similar, there was only one option that seemd like it could help)
I believe it just runs fsck.
Something worth mentioning: this system couldn’t mount my linux system partition.
After running almost any of it’s repair tools, there is a prompt to select partition to run it on. Next to this system partition there is: “unable to mount” message.
if its the 100gb nvme1n1p2, then it looks like its really empty …
and you cant access the f2fs partitions?
and if you check in kde partition manager, did it shows that there are some files?
Only system one now, I couldn’t access vfat /boot/efi pratition before, but I have erased it few times trying to reinstall grub. Other partitions work fine.
Partition manager says nothing about files, but I don’t really believe what it says, there was never anything about flags or mount points, just blank spae.
with files i meant, if it shows how much is used, or if it shows the partition as empty…
since you cant access it, you could try reinstall again, but this time dont use f2fs
I will try, but before that I will create bit to bit copy of that partition using dd. Maybe I will find a way to restore damaged part of that partition.
I don’t think f2fs is a reason of this failure. I’ve been using it for years now without an issue. Only recently after I’ve reinstalled windows (this time on GPT, before it was on MBR) strange stuff started to happen.