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Topic: [SOLVED] From a failed update to a total system damage (Read 911 times) previous topic - next topic
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[SOLVED] From a failed update to a total system damage

Hi guys. So I was happily living in my Artixlinud, when yesturday I decided to update through pacman -Suy. First, the nvidia drivers were now in some conflict, this is probably due to a recent(yesturdays) newly released package nvidia-450. So this was unlucky.
Now I tried to fix it by installing it again, didnt work, so then I decided to remove the package with the dependencies pacman -Rcns. Then install pacman -S extra/nvidia to get the newest nvidia-450. "Mayby this would work". Afterwards I did sudo nvidia-xconfig. So far, so good. Reset my X and.... theres just a blinking underscore... not blinking regularly tho... its trying to do something but obvoiusly failing. I recorded this behavior. Also, when trying to use a different tty it will steal the focus back to that underscore after max 1 sec. So no chance of loging in. Please have a look: https://we.tl/b-lrfxFDmlXG
So it seams I have offically broken my artix  :'(  >:(
What can I do besides what windows people do: format+install?
PS. I havent made a rsync backup yet, so I really want to fix it if possible.

Re: From a failed update to a total system damage

Reply #1 –
If this is after X starts in the boot then disable that from a live iso or another partition so you can get a tty. Or chroot from an up to date Artix iso if you can't get a terminal on the OS itself. Actually you can usually chroot from other distros but that might cause extra problems.  :D  Look at /var/log/pacman.log and .bash_history (in your home dir and in /root as well if you use root commands, not sudo) to see what you did if you can't remember precisely, and reinstall your previous setup from /var/cache/pacman/pkg using pacman -U.

Re: From a failed update to a total system damage

Reply #2 –
Quote from: Dawav3 – on
What can I do besides what windows people do: format+install?
PS. I havent made a rsync backup yet, so I really want to fix it if possible.
The tty switch is from your login manager that tries repeatedly to launch (which is not right, usually they quit trying after a few times). Either boot in single-user mode or use a live Artix ISO to chroot into your installation and perform the downgrade below. You should know (or learn how) to do such tasks, these are the perks of rolling-release.

Now, once inside your installation, downgrade nvidia, nvidia-utils and nvidia-settings to the last 440 with pacman -U from your cache. If you don't have 440 there, use our package archive to get them. You might need nvidia-dkms-440 instead of nvidia-440 if you want to keep your current kernel, otherwise you have to find the previous working one from /var/log/pacman.log and downgrade that too.

Re: From a failed update to a total system damage

Reply #3 –
Quote from: nous – on
The tty switch is from your login manager that tries repeatedly to launch (which is not right, usually they quit trying after a few times).


runit/s6 will constantly try to restart a crashing daemon by default. It's something that could be worth changing though in our scripts for display managers and the like. I don't remember how this works on Arch but by default systemd also will constantly try to restart a service. It's possible they might have limited the amount of retries in the service file.

Re: From a failed update to a total system damage

Reply #5 –
It worked!
Thank you #######, Dudemanguy and nous.
I still had my iso pen, so i booted into a live instance, chrooted and downgraded using cash. Just like you said.
/var/log/Xorg.0.log shows no errors, drivers seam to have loaded fine.