#can't boot into arch

322 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

fiery mango
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made on behalf of @unreal owl

unreal owl
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Cool thanks

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So this is my problem

#quick-questions message

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Well that's where I'm at

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This is my problem

#quick-questions message

fiery mango
fiery mango
unreal owl
unreal owl
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Any ideas?

kindred ice
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Idk... Reinstall Linux kernel?

unreal owl
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I feel like there's a better way to fix it

kindred ice
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pacman -S linux linux-headers or something

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Or run archinstall trollface

unreal owl
kindred ice
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Failed how?

unreal owl
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Some error

onyx zenith
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In the last line it says - must be writable, it seems like permission issue.

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installation process requires write access to this file.

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change directory permssion like - sudo chmod -R 755 /boot/EFI/Linux/....

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or change directory ownership...

unreal owl
unreal owl
unreal owl
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Now I am able to see arch in grub

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However I'm stuck at the terminal loading screen and it just says Loading Linux Linux...

unreal owl
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Stuck on this screen for so long. How would I fix this?

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kindred ice
unreal owl
fiery mango
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@unreal owl don't syyu, syu is just fine

kindred ice
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By installing the kernel again, the pacman hooks will rebuild the intramfs again for you

unreal owl
kindred ice
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It's basically a roundabout way to run mkinitcpio -P but atleast it's making sure that everything is fine

unreal owl
unreal owl
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I changed the chmod perms but still not working @kindred ice

unreal owl
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Help?

onyx zenith
onyx zenith
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you can do as per advised by @kindred ice

unreal owl
unreal owl
unreal owl
onyx zenith
unreal owl
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What's the best way expand nvme0n1p1 to 1GiB? I also plan on making a swap partition too. Though, I don't want to ruin the data in my main drive in nvme0n1p2.

PXL_20240715_194310988.jpg
kindred ice
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Best bet is to just reinstall everything dogekek

unreal owl
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Nah bro I got too many precious stuff on there. There has to be another way

unreal owl
kindred ice
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Hmmm

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Off the top of my head

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I guess you could kill this EFI partition

fiery mango
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look like you need to go through a normal install which usually requires wiping a drive. i would suggest you buy a drive to install arch to.

kindred ice
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And resize the end of your root partition to make some room

unreal owl
kindred ice
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So basically moving the EFI from the start of your drive to the end

unreal owl
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But that would mean resizing p2 right?

kindred ice
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I think it might be possible but ehh

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Yeah

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I haven't tried this at all

unreal owl
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Would that erase all data in p2. Resizing and formatting it all?

kindred ice
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And it's just a conjecture

kindred ice
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Just resizing

unreal owl
fiery mango
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resizing can

kindred ice
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Formatting will delete everything

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Yeah, it can lead to dataloss

unreal owl
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Data loss. I don't Iike data loss

kindred ice
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There's probably some precautions we can make here

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Like making sure that all the data is in the start of the partition

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But I'm not sure how to do it on Linux yet

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Or if it even is necessary

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You can just use testdisk and make a backup of the partition

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Just to be safe

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Then resize it with something easy like gpartef

kindred ice
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Or if you have btrfs, then you prob won't need to do anything

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But idk

unreal owl
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Don't have btrfs

kindred ice
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Anyways

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Although there's always a risk

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If that was me, I'm going to be pretty comfy doing it on my own system

unreal owl
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Deleting p1 and making another partition at the end and format it to efi?

kindred ice
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Basically

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If p1 is your /boot

unreal owl
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And are you sure that's the problem?

kindred ice
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And p2/root

kindred ice
unreal owl
fiery mango
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how long did you wait

kindred ice
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Have we tried reinstalling grub yet?

unreal owl
unreal owl
kindred ice
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Like doing everything again from scratch

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Mounting p1 to /boot

unreal owl
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Yeah I did the whole grub-install thing

kindred ice
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Grub-inst.. etc

unreal owl
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Documented it somewhere in this chat

fiery mango
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is the second partition a current linux install?

kindred ice
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Wait a minute

unreal owl
fiery mango
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is this a partition recovery?

kindred ice
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Why is it vfat

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Isn't it supposed to be fat32?

fiery mango
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vfat for uefi

unreal owl
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Confused. What are you talking about

kindred ice
unreal owl
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Looks fine to me. I believe that was the option once I selected EFI filesystem in cfdisk

kindred ice
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Can you do mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/xxx

unreal owl
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That makes it fat32

kindred ice
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Then grub install

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Yes

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That's precisely it

unreal owl
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I don't see how that will change anything

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Did a little reading and it says vfat has backwards compatibility with fat

fiery mango
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it does

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vfat is the filesystem that is usually used with efi installs

unreal owl
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Seems ok to me

fiery mango
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fat32 is kinda the old school file system

kindred ice
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Ehh

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Iirc there was some issues with it

fiery mango
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you can use a couple different filesystems for efi now

kindred ice
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Yeah, I can use btrfs with it too but

fiery mango
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vfat is usually more robust for efi partitions

kindred ice
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Wait lemme check the wiki

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This is from the grub manual

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Vfat isn't listed there but

kindred ice
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So idk too why he'd have a vfat on an arch install

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here's what the wiki says as well

Screenshot_20240716-075655.png
fiery mango
kindred ice
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So maybe try changing grub cfg to use /dev/xxx as a trial?

fiery mango
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uuid is usually a better idea

kindred ice
kindred ice
kindred ice
kindred ice
fiery mango
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🤷

kindred ice
# fiery mango 🤷

Dw, we're both guessing dogekek, trying to make sense of why he can't access his boot when it should've been possible

unreal owl
unreal owl
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I would feel like 512MiB would be enough

fiery mango
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@unreal owl try it and see

unreal owl
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1GB you said?

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@fiery mango do I have to delete p1 or can I just keep it, make p3 and make p3 my boot

fiery mango
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@fiery mango

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i would suggest deleting partition 1 and recreating partition 1. making partition 3 would require resizing partition 1 to some small amount that would accommodate the size you need for partition 3. after that you would need to set the boot flags for partition 3 and reinstall to the new boot target.

unreal owl
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Hopefully this doesn't break p2

fiery mango
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if you dont touch partition 2 then it should be fine

unreal owl
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But I did touch p2

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I had to shrink it

fiery mango
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what was the total space used for part 2 in percentage?

unreal owl
fiery mango
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yeah thats just what is allocated

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since its done we will have to roll with it

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if the drive isnt 50% full it should be fine

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but we can also use testdisk to try to recover anything that might have been lost

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since the size is 1.8t i believe you will be ok

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if you continue to have boot errors/issues, we can also walk you through smart tests.

kindred ice
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Ehh

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We'll see

unreal owl
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I have a problem with expanding the p1 partition

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it kinda caps out at 512MB

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Tried making it 513MiB, wouldn't work

unreal owl
fiery mango
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whats the total free space

kindred ice
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Which is why I suggested to shrink p2 and make a p3 to mount as your boot

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Moving around partitions is a slippery slope that can lead to dataloss

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But

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It's your choice in the end anyways

unreal owl
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ah ok. I swear one of you said to resize p1 and continue to use p1

fiery mango
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sound like the changes have not been committed, like resizing your part 2.

kindred ice
fiery mango
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yes you can reuse p1. 512mb is plenty for efi install.

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my current /boot is 151mb.

unreal owl
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wait I thought we are making another EFI partition because my 512 p1 efi boot is too small

kindred ice
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Expanding it to 1gb is fraught with dangers, but make a new one should be easier

unreal owl
kindred ice
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Wellp, there we go then

unreal owl
fiery mango
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i believe that is in your tempfs or / partition

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sorry /var/cache/pacman/pkg/

kindred ice
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Yeah, "boot must be writeable"

unreal owl
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but I think I was mounted to p2

kindred ice
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Yeah

unreal owl
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is that an issue?

kindred ice
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No?

unreal owl
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and p2 has like 1.8T so idk what it means writable error

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I gave it chmod 755 too

unreal owl
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Damn. Wtf

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kindred ice
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dmesg

unreal owl
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Yeah it said something about the geometry of p2

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So I probably messed something up when shrinking it

kindred ice
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Maybe

kindred ice
unreal owl
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I don't believe I backed it up

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Oh damn, I forgot to backup my 3d print files somewhere else

kindred ice
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I forgot but you used archinstall right?

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Like way way back?

unreal owl
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I think for this particular one yeah

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I previously had done it manually and I think it broke or something and so I wanted to test out the archinstall script

kindred ice
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I see

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Then

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Can you install dosfstools

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And mount p1 to /boot

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Then retry mkinitcpio -P

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I'm just curious

unreal owl
kindred ice
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Fsck did not do anything for you?

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Or even chroot

unreal owl
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Can you even chroot without first mounting p2 /mnt?

kindred ice
kindred ice
unreal owl
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Let me check

fiery mango
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You can state the file system type

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Some file systems will keep their attribute tables at the end of the partition. Fsck is also not recommended for some types of file systems. Your fstab should have a fsck flag to check or not, while it is mounting.

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What was the file system?

unreal owl
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Probably ext4

fiery mango
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I would manually tell mount the file system type to try and help with mounting and also disable fsck on mounting

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You are probably getting errors

unreal owl
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Uh, turns out I need some files from the computer. Is there a way for me to mount and copy those files over to another drive?

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@fiery mango didn't work

kindred ice
unreal owl
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uh how do I use this?

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interesting. neat tool

fiery mango
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Please run

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smartctl -t offline /dev/yourdrive

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I will have to check the syntax

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@unreal owl

unreal owl
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uhh accidentally ran advanced scanning in TestDesk. This might take a while

fiery mango
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Testdisk can copy files from one failing disk or disk being audited to another disk for chain of custody or good working new disk to replace the failing one

unreal owl
fiery mango
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Yes please

unreal owl
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@fiery mango

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ok using testdisk I can find my files

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doesn't seem to be deleted. can I move them to my other drive?

fiery mango
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Yes

unreal owl
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I can't seem to select another drive

fiery mango
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Got a picture?

unreal owl
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wtf

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I tried copying and now all my files are missing from testdisk

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from my /documents directory

fiery mango
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It might not be in the same path that you are thinking

unreal owl
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I'm so confused

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I can't find the directory with all my files

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This is what I see

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It's supposed to have a bunch of files and directories in there

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that was the last file I pressed "c" on too. idk if I accidentall deleted everything else

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oh found them

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in the Analyze menu

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ok so I didn't accidentally delete anything that's good

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so how do I copy these files to a different drive

fiery mango
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@fiery mango

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You will have to designate the source and destination in order to get the copy function

unreal owl
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So I'm here. Where is that located

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Maybe this

PXL_20240716_201711983.jpg
fiery mango
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Read the bottom

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Then read the top

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C for copy mode

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Select destination

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C when destination is correct

unreal owl
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yeah I did the same thing last time and when I pulled out the drive to check on another computer, it wasn't copied

fiery mango
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Are you changing devices when you select destination?

unreal owl
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yeah let me check again. I think this time it said 1 OK

fiery mango
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Yeah sorry it's not an easier process

unreal owl
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nah it could be worse. this tool seems alright

fiery mango
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This software is usually for advanced or expert users so ease of use is not a concern

unreal owl
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it seems intuitive enough

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hmmmmm not here for some reason

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odd

fiery mango
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After you copy your files, can we check the drive health of your nvme with smartctl -H /dev/your device?

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Are you able to select a different device for your destination during copy mode?

unreal owl
fiery mango
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What's the file size?

unreal owl
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43145 bytes looks like

fiery mango
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Good it's not zero

unreal owl
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I wonder if I'm choosing the correct directory

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is there any other way?

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I don't think I'm copying to the correct directory

fiery mango
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Yeah sorry, there is not much I can assist here

unreal owl
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and I can't just simply cp it because I can't mount and chroot it

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hmm ok it says dev/sdb1 is not a directory

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how else do I accesss my drive

unreal owl
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Couldn't get copy to work but here's the smartctl. It passed as expected

PXL_20240716_212049883.jpg
fiery mango
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@fiery mango

fiery mango
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Before you get into testdisk please mount your sdb to /moveme and then you can copy to a directory

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@unreal owl

unreal owl
fiery mango
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It's the same process for your nvme

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Should be sdb1 or what ever partition

unreal owl
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Can't find ext4 filesystem, invalid fs_name, failed to read boot sector, failed to recognize exfat type

PXL_20240716_222005288.jpg
fiery mango
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@fiery mango

onyx zenith
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hey, how much progress ?

unreal owl
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Uhh hee hee hee

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I slept

fiery mango
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Please make sure the p1 or partition numbers are correct or included

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Also the mounting directories should be simple

fiery mango
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@unreal owl

unreal owl
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yo what happened to @fiery mango ? they're not in the thread anymore

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oh they just popped up

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yeah ima just use my arch laptop for now. Hopefully this doesn't break. Maybe I'll get back to solving the problem in another week. I'm kind of busy the upcoming week. Tryna get my sec+ cert

fiery mango
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o/

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make sure your syntax is correct while you are mounting devices

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@unreal owl

unreal owl
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hmm where was I. Had a bit of a break

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Oh yeah I was in the process of using testdisk to copy my system to another drive

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what are the important directories again? home and something in etc

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yeah etc and home

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holy fuck so many failed files

unreal owl
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hmmmmmm