Solus won't boot after update

Syn

Hello,
I've been running Solus on a Dell XPS 13 for a few months and was really satisfied with it. However, two weeks ago, an update broke it and it had a hard time booting. For some reason, I had to press F12 during boot and go to the boot menu for it to boot properly. Also, it would only boot to tty and I had to manually switch to the graphical environment.
After an update, everything was fine again : it booted nicely.
But then, I've got another update yesterday. If I remember well, it was some desktop branding things. I updated, tried to reboot, and nothing. All I see is a black screen after the DELL splash screen. I can't access anything, no input works.
I don't think the problem is the hard drive : I'm currently running Fedora on it while waiting for a fix, and it works just fine, no boot problems.

Can anyone help?

Thanks in advance !

Girtablulu

Can you access the TTY? Ctrl+alt+f2

Syn

Girtablulu nope, nothing works. Black screen with no response at all.

Girtablulu

Syn well then you have to choot in, run a full update and check for any broken packages

Syn

Girtablulu So, I tried that but it doesn't let me go all the way through.
Here's what I get from trying the Legacy way on Solus' website. I get stuck at this point :
root@solus /home/live # mount /dev/nvme0n1 /target mount: /target: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/nvme0n1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.
And with the UEFI way, this is where I get stuck :
root@solus /home/live # mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /target/boot mount: /target/boot: mount point does not exist.

Here's my fdisk output :
Device Size Type /dev/nvme0n1p1 488.3M EFI System /dev/nvme0n1p2 3.7G Linux swap /dev/nvme0n1p3 234.3G Linux filesystem

Syn

Girtablulu So apparently this looks like a kernel problem. When I choose alternative boot options during boot, I can boot from 4.20 kernel. I guess the new 5.0 kernel broke something...?

Louhy

Syn And with the UEFI way, this is where I get stuck :
root@solus /home/live # mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /target/boot
mount: /target/boot: mount point does not exist.

Probably a stupid question but could you have missed a step before that (bold)?

sudo su
mkdir /target
mount /dev/nvme0n1p3 /target
mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /target/boot

Edit: Of course if it's a problem with a new kernel I guess maybe it won't matter. 🙁

Justin

Syn mount /dev/nvme0n1 /target

You're trying to mount the whole drive, not the partition.

You want mount /dev/nvme0n1p3 /target

Syn

Louhy Same result, nothing helps. I can only boot to 4.20 kernel. 🙁 Waiting for today's update to see if it helps.

Girtablulu

Syn it weird @DataDrake are you aware of any nvme changes inside kernel 5?

DataDrake

Girtablulu not off-hand.

[deleted]

Girtablulu Yes, same problem here - NVMe and Nvidia hardware, Solus totally went blank recently.

Syn

Justin Indeed, my bad on that one ! Thank you.
So, apparently there's an issue with lvmetad?
root@solus / # sudo clr-boot-manager update Generating grub configuration file ... WARNING: Failed to connect to lvmetad. Falling back to device scanning.
I checked the packages, nothing is broken. Nothing is out of date, and I event tied reinstalling the Linux - current package, to no avail. It still won't boot unless I pick the 4.2 kernel.

DataDrake

Syn lvmetad is a red-herring, you can ignore that warning. Edit: I need to know the exact version of the 4.20 and 5.0 kernels in order to help.

FunnyBunny581

Also having similar issue with solus not booting after update. I can press spacebar and select the older kernal and it boots fine. I also have a nvme drive.

Louhy

Not sure if NVMe matters, but I did have problems booting with the open driver. (I have the latest Solus 4.0 on an NVidia laptop which I believe has an NVMe drive.)

Are these blank screen systems using the "nouveau" default driver? I guess that's built into kernel. If not and you can boot into the older kernel, I've had luck switching drivers via Doflicky.

Syn

Louhy hmm my laptop doesn't have an Nvidia card, and nothing shows in Doflicky. I do remember, however, seeing Nvidia somewhere when I checked for package integrity. I don't know if that's relevant though.

If other people with Nvme drives have the same problem however, it might be a good clue I guess.

Louhy

Ah. Also turns out this laptop has an M.2 drive, but it's SATA. So maybe nvme related...

Syn

DataDrake the computer cannot boot with the 5.0.12-115.current.
The kernel that works is 4.20.16-112.current.
Thanks a lot !

DataDrake

Syn Nothing is popping out at me kernel side, so I'm pretty sure you must have a broken package or something.

Syn

DataDrake How can I check that? The check broken package command shows everything as "OK". And everything works before update, even on a clean install. The update is causing this. I tried reinstalling the whole system, I can reboot and use it. But as soon as I update, nothing works anymore.