• [deleted]

  • Post #1
  • Edited

This is not really a support question, more like a "what the hell happened"-question.

I had an adventure with old GTX1050 I tried to boot my HTPC with. Didn't manage to get past systemd, no failures, no errors, it just hangs before SDDM. Then I had a wise idea to preinstall NVIDIA proprietary drivers before I put the GPU in. Didn't manage to boot with that either, may be wrong driver version, I don't know and I don't care at this point. With all that hassle I'm content with my RX550 🙂

Anyway, since the proprietary drivers were installed I couldn't boot with AMD GPU either, so I had to proceed flashing a live USB and booting with that. Carefully following the boot rescue instructions at Help Center, I decrypted and chrooted to my system. The only mishap was that I mounted /dev/SolusSystem/Root instead of /dev/mapper/SolusSystem-Root, but that shouldn't make a difference as far as I know.

When I chrooted, I got an error message cannot find name for user ID 0 and the user name was "I have no name!". I proceeded to eopkg history -t anyway. I'm a reckless human being.

After rebooting I got to SDDM, but couldn't log in to my user. Invalid password. Huh, seems weird. After more thorough examination I noticed the user is absent on /etc/passwd. While the home folder is intact the user is just gone.

Afterwards I've created a new user, migrated the home folder and reinstalled all packages to be sure. I'm still puzzled how did I proceed to delete the user at any point? Could someone wiser enlighten me what happened?

TL;DR Use AMD

    [deleted] I proceeded to eopkg history -t anyway. I'm a reckless human being.

    I operate at this level as well.🙂
    When you change screen drivers on the fly like that they sometimes cause a complete divorce with the Display Manager and subsequent fubar.
    But the password thing? Weird.
    Can't vouch for the /mapper vs. /root method--I wonder if there was a difference?

    You had the famous boot hang, then switched drivers, then go live usb and fail to mount there. At what step could a user profile have been deleted? (your question)
    Unless it was already gone?
    Signed, brent, lover of mysteries...

        • [deleted]

        • Post #3
        • Edited

        brent

        You had the famous boot hang, then switched drivers, then go live usb and fail to mount there

        Yea, boot hang on GTX 1050 with and without nomodeset. Preinstalled proprietary drivers with AMD GPU in. Tried to boot again with GTX 1050. No luck. Then couldn't boot on AMD either due to the drivers being present.

        The mount didn't fail, I got the error when chrooting in.

            [deleted] really long shot: unless you lvm encrypted drive and forgot because it was so long ago?
            or
            If it's a home theater rig I wonder...is there a competing peripheral or software on this thing that 'thinks' the OS is subservient to it or didn't play nice with. I can't think of anything you did that would cause that deleted profile weirdness.
            history could be interesting...edit: would have been interesting that is..

                • [deleted]

                • Post #5

                brent It's a small form-factor PC connected to my TV via HDMI. No odd peripherals there.
                The drive is encrypted, yes, but it was decrypted successfully. Can't say what went wrong, I'm pretty sure I did all bind mounts and chrooted like always.. I had the instructions open so I wasn't relying on my memory 😃

                    • [deleted]

                    • Post #7
                    • Edited

                    brent Well, I solved what I could without resorting to reinstallation. I made a new user account and did the classic "dump all installed packages to file and then reinstall everything in series" trick. Haven't seen anything broken yet except for some KDE config references to the old user due to me just copying the full home folder over.

                    I still would like to know why, though. The truth is out there somewhere.