Trying to help a friend who found himself in emergency mode

zmaint

Solus Plasma, he says he did updates yesterday and then shut down. He lives in the country and his internet is absolute crap, like dial up bad. Turned on his PC this morning and this is what he got. He's going to bring his PC by this week and I'm going to take a look at it. I'm assuming it can be fixed with chroot and then re-doing updates? Any other thoughts/suggestions?

brent

perfectly functioning Solus Plasma then did updates and now borked?
If that's the case it looks (nothing as it appears😉!) like boot is not being seen for reasons I can't determine. I have always fixed borked boots with chroot.

other random thoughts: fsck service is disabled? why? couldn't you just sudo systemctl enable xxx.service? too easy? the thing is begging him to check out the logs. journalctl will have clues.
throwing darts here

zmaint

brent That's what he says. No idea how long it's been since he updated last either. His connection is terrible so he tends to put it off until he has enough time to spend the day waiting on downloads.

I'm hoping it's not a drive issue. I'll check out the journalctl when he gets here.

Kinda reminds me of the time my daughter got tired of waiting on updates and just hard powered it off, went to bed, got up and then it was a very similar screen. Her apartment had the worst DSL I've ever seen, and she was on wifi to boot. Chroot and re-running eopkg fixed everything. Hoping that works here as well.

brent

zmaint Kinda reminds me of the time my daughter got tired of waiting on updates and just hard powered it off, went to bed, got up and then it was a very similar screen.

DSL in the USA SUCKS sometimes. i used to blame the ISP. Where I used to live it was over a fishing line in an decrepitly old apartment which completely lost connection every other month and service to repair home internet that you pay for is an arrogant 10-day wait.....we kept the same carrier and moved across the street and never had nothing happen.

Moral? maybe the ISP trusts the APT maintain the integrity of whatever cluster of wires is in the property? who knows.

as for shutting it off mid-update...we all should have learned from the Windows days and BSOD among other things.
Back on topic: there's a couple plasma-related black screen posts. Lemme cut and paste some of that output ino Search Engine for kicks. BRB.

brent

very yucky reading on these dependency errors. of 8 things read so far all point to wrong mount point, partition UUIDs, and file corruption so far. Wonder is you can TTY and sudo eopkgcheck then use that gigantic repair command after that?

zmaint

brent I will def try this first.

brent

zmaint sudo eopkg check | tee /dev/stderr | grep Broken | awk '{print $4}' | xargs sudo eopkg it --reinstall after check

sometimes that is useless but eliminates the obvious. surprised there are no more replies on this Sunday, walks and talks and quacks like a boot problem. all other reading (yucky) suggests uuid mismatch.

but if you navigate thru the boot rescue section at Main Site that may fix things.

You are helping a friend who also has Solus, and has a problem...that is really cool. I hope you get more 2 cents before he comes to your house.

zmaint

brent Bad hard drive. His nvme drive crapped out, won't even mount. journalctl is full of nice red nvme drive read errors. I just re-installed everything to his SSD, working fine.

brent

zmaint nice troubleshooting

zmaint

brent It was an ADATA, if anyone is curious. I'm not super familiar with the brand. I try to stick with Samsung where possible, or maybe Kingston if on a budget. Just very glad it wasn't the motherboard!