htmx-playground/tuts/fixing_computer.md

How to save your penguin when your system wont boot after removing or changing a drive

So first off, what was my problem?

I had setup my 1TB HDD in /etc/fstab and everything was perfect. I could boot my system and BLAM, there it was all nice and mounted. Little did i know, this would come to bite me.

What happened?

I was just playing around and testing things when i set up my drive with fstab. I had no idea what that even meant. I knew i planned to eventually dual boot windows on this thing, just didnt know when. Well, today was the day. I reformatted the drive as NTFS and attempted to load up windows on the little fella. Unfortunately that failed misserably, probably due to a bad drive tbh. I said f**k-it and went to boot back into arch. i was tired of fucking with it. I wasted enough time.

I booted...

... wah... what is this?..

i get hit with a message saying that arch cant boot, arch cant sign in, and arch is fucked. It tells me to press enter to continue. That didnt do jack diddly squat. What do i do now?

The solution

I reeeeeeally didnt wanna have to format my usb stick again, but it seems i had no choice. I KNOW that pesky fstab file is the culprit. And, i KNOW i need to change it. I need to delete that dasterdly line i added to auto boot that 1TB drive of mine.

I caved, loaded up arch onto my flashdrive. Slammed it in that sexy blue usb port. And booted.

what do i do? .... lets see... Oh thats right, i need to mount my drive.

lets go ahead and do that...

clickity clack on the K-B-D...

fdisk -l
# shows my drives n shit
# pics my drive (nvme0n1)
# partition (p2) 465.3G

so thats my drive. I need a place to mount it.

mkdir /repair # drive mount point 

lets mount it

mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /repair
cd /repair

THANK GOD it mounted without issues.. Why would it give me issues? hell if i know at this point.

I go into that /etc/fstab file, and open it with vim...

vim /etc/fstab
#... empty file

WTF??? oh come on..... oh wait.. duuuh relative path - me stupid

vim ./etc/fstab
#... lots of stuff 

I see the line.. the line causing me all this pain... I go to the line in question.... and perform the all mighty dd

i save.. :w it saves.. YES!!, i say i quit.. :q i reboot.. reboot i wait..

The results

YES IM IN! Im finally booted back into my beautiful ass KDE Plasma environement. Never thought id see her gorgeous face again!

This was scary for 1 main reason... Im no linux guru. I barely know what im doing half the time. And i break my stuff a lot and usually end up having to reinstall everything.. I did not want to go through that again lol

im sure ill be back with another end note