Updated (20may2022) and will not boot up on restart

mspiff

Hi all,

Running Solus near flawlessly for 8 months, finally had a bit of a hiccup after the update.

I'm running an old iMac and dual booting, boots fine into macOS, black screen for Solus. I think it's booting, the black screen changes hue somewhat but display never changes after that.

So it's either not booting into Solus or it boots without display.

I hope I'm the only one with this issue and everyone else is running smooth, but does anyone have an idea of what could be happening with my system?

Thanks in advance

528491

Can you access a tty after booting? Try Ctrl+Alt+F2 and check if you get a login prompt.

mspiff

thanks for the reply!

I just updated my laptop at work ( old 2010 mbp) and it has no problem. Will try ctrl-alt-f2 on on iMac when I get home.

So it works just fine on this similar generation mac... strange

528491

First step if you can access tty:
sudo eopkg check | grep Broken | awk '{print $4}' | xargs sudo eopkg it --reinstall
Note that you may have to replace "Broken" if your system language isn't english.

mspiff

528491

hmm looks like ctrl-alt-f2 doesn't work. Any other options?

Thanks again

brent

mspiff hmm looks like ctrl-alt-f2 doesn't work. Any other options?

If Mac and Solus happily dual-booted together and now they don't then something's wrong with the boot.
Your dual boot screen shows mac and solus. you hit 'solus'. and you have a blank screen. and you have no terminal.
https://getsol.us/articles/troubleshooting/boot-rescue/en/
^^^ get a live USB of solus and fix the boot. read that very carefully, and do the steps sequentially, and make some time for it, and you will have success. You will either freshen the solus boot thru mac or more likely fix the broken boot in live Solus via CHROOT-ing.

If you have a blank screen and NO terminal, I don't see any other way than this.

mspiff

brent

Thanks Brent I'll give it a go

I'll only be touching the boot, correct?

mspiff

brent

Going through the process in the link,

"...If your system uses UEFI as opposed to GRUB, you will also need to mount your EFI System Partition, otherwise referred to as ESP. If you followed our UEFI guide during installation of Solus, then in all likelihood your ESP will be about 500mb in size. If you’re unsure of the partition, run the following, replacing X with the same letter during your mounting of your root file system, minus the number:

fdisk -o Device,Size,Type -l /dev/sdX
Your output may look something similiar to:

Device Size Type
/dev/sda1 512M EFI System
/dev/sda2 111.3G Linux filesystem
Notice we have /dev/sda1 as the Device with the EFI System type and roughly 500mb in size. This is the partition we will be mounting."

So I will be mounting sda1 but when I input the next step
mount /dev/sda1 /target/boot

it says 'Mount point does not exist'. All other steps followed to the letter.

Any thoughts as to what the hiccup is?

Here's something- my sda1 is 200m, not the usual 500 default. Might be the root of the problem (and I have no idea how I got a 200m sda1)

528491

Nicely put, @brent . That would've been my second and last thing to suggest too.
Well wait. Another thing you can try is this (from help center):

Bring up the boot menu with no timeout set?

By default, EFI installs will not show the boot menu and boot directly into Solus. By hitting space bar (repeatedly) during boot, the boot menu will appear (it may take a couple of goes to get the timing right).

When you reached the menu, select an older boot configuration and try to boot that.

mspiff

528491

Hitting spacebar gives 3 options

solus current 5.15.26-211.conf

solus current 5.15.30-212.conf

mac

neither solus option work

Staudey

mspiff Hitting spacebar gives 3 options

solus current 5.15.26-211.conf

solus current 5.15.30-212.conf

Neither of those are the current version of the kernel, so either it wasn't a full update, or your ESP ran out of space and it couldn't save the new kernel image there.

brent

mspiff If I am conceptualizing correctly, the SolusLive USB will let you mount your ailing HDD solus (takes a few steps to get it right) and perform 'surgery' on it. @Staudey here^ just proved you were not up to date with the kernel, so one of your commands in that tutorial will be sudo eopkg up will will update system completely. I was completely intimidated by that tutorial the first time I did it but not anymore having done it.

mspiff

Staudey

Ah ok. I'm guessing that's it. I'm a bit of a rookie here- how would I go about fixing that- disk utility> reallocate more space to esp... but then if it didn't update properly with the right kernel, it wouldn't boot anyways, correct?

brent

in addition (referring to Staudey info) if there are too many old kernels, and it just a space issue, then you have to manually delete these kernels.
1) How you can verify it's an esp space problem?
and
2)the commands to delete extra kernels taking up space?
I don't know the answers to those two but someone does.

brent

thoughts/
if yr boot is 512 (solus rec) or thereabouts you will be fine. I NEVER read about people growing the /boot out past 512 to accomodate more kernels. only if boot was too small to begin with.
....going into live usb and growing it out is pretty risky though, even for a pro (not me) because you will damage an existing filesystem it takes the space from.
If you were out of room for that one XXX.current package you would have got an error if updating through terminal. If you did it through the Software Center I have no idea if it would fire off warning.
Either way: no native terminal, no troubleshooting. Unless you do it thru the live usb. I think this is package-related and a doable fix. boots get borked now and then.

brent

mspiff quickly as I'm winding it down....

if /dev/sda1 is flagged as your boot and esp....then I really don't think you can boot with 200MB. You need 512.....you do not need to mount this to change it. Just change it in Disks or Gparted in the live usb. I think you will be fine then. --Gparted will tell you what if your sda1 flags are esp and boot.

Still though you need to mount the sda1 after its 512. I've often found with these steps is I messed something up on the mkdir and target parts above the 'encryption' section. Go back and try again. I've messed this up before.

Here's the weird part. If you can't boot into solus because the boot is too small, then fixing it in live usb could fix it.

But if broken packages exist--like I think--then you have to keep going thru the steps till you get it right. I did not get it right the first time. You have to be able to run the eopkg up command after mount.
Good luck and more power to you. It's daunting to do this I know.

Plan B is if your stuff is backed up to your liking then the a fresh install is easy too.

mspiff

brent

Thank you Brent, I will try this later. No I don't have a backup of files, so I'm going to walk on eggshells to try and get this right.

Expanding sda1 in gparted, that will wipe the boot sequence on it? forgive my rookieness but how to you put just the boot sequence back on, or am I misunderstanding completely?

Thanks again!

brent

sdb1 is my solus boot. if I was in live usb I would resize to 500-512. I THINK you can do this from your current 200MB with no repercussions. I hope someone on this forum gives you a second opinion.

while in gparted, selected Parition/Manage flags.

all that's required for the boot drive is the boot and esp flags be set. I was just telling you make sure they didn't change/or make sure they look like that. It's likely the are already set that way.

mspiff so I'm going to walk on eggshells to try and get this right.

yeah....welcome to Linux🙂, But when you jump this hurdle the victory will be sweet and you will get more confidence. That boot rescue is HARD the first time.

I hope someone can give you a 2nd opinion, but I'm pretty sure your boot partition is messed up.

mspiff

brent

Yep it is messed to be sure.

I wonder why I had old kernels, you'd think with new updates they'd be removed/replaced...

Just wondering, can I

A) reformat sda1 and reinstall current boot sequence, with proper kernel, without reinstalling full ISO

B)copy the full contents of sda4 which is my solus home and put it on a usb

Thanks again for your help. Been installing distros for ages but never comfortable with command line. Finally starting to understand how things work. Not terribly difficult but when things don't work it's a little frustrating.

mspiff

to clarify: because of the error on the partition, it won't allow me to resize it.