Issues With Cachy Continue Pt2

I get the hardware and immediately boot into a CachyOS live environment. It did boot up Windows though because my wife didn’t know that I didn’t want to boot into Windows at all and she hit the power button when I wasn’t ready, lol. So the machine has been tainted unfortunately :(. Inside the live environment I waste no time. I connect to the wireless router and start the installer. For the first time in forever I hit the option “wipe the disk and use it all” and click install. Man I couldn’t wait to be back in CachyOS, I really liked it there. The install was uneventful as expected and I was booting into the install in no time at all.

I get all settled in and get used to the keyboard and touchpad and everything is going well. Then I decide it’s time to go get the SSD out of the old main computer and install it in this thing’s secondary M.2 slot. The hardware swap was uneventful thankfully and I boot back up only to find that my disk isn’t anywhere to be seen. Nothing shows up in Dolphin, lsblk only shows my NVMe and even my UEFI firmware displays no other hard drive installed. I once again crack the bottom off the laptop and check the seating on the hard drive. Everything seems fine so I boot back into Cachy to see what I can see. Nothing. Now, one of these times I believe I locked up hard transitioning from the login screen to the desktop and hard powered off the machine.

I open the bottom of the laptop one more time and remove the second ssd and reassemble things. I get a good glimpse at the socket and the cards connector and notice that the socket only has one slit where as the card has 2. Great, so they’re not compatible, I hope I didn’t fuck up that harddrive now or that slot. Problem for another day, I just want to get back into Cachy and finish getting settled in. I still have a bit to do so I boot up but am presented with a nice error. I’m at a terminal prompt somehow but there’s not a lot I can do and I can’t make sense of where I am. So I decide to boot into a live session.

In the live session I just want to be able to chroot into the environment and fix whatever is broken, something about not being able to mount the root partition. I should be able to fix that, somehow my fstab got corrupted? So I figure out how to use cachy-chroot and get that fired up which presents me with a selector showing me all my partitions. I select my root and hope for the best but it gives me an error as well. Something about a missing superblock? Not sure what that means. Let me just try and mount it using Dolphin… which gives me the same error… so I hit the search engines. I find the commands I need to inspect and report on the status of the partition. Journalctl tells me that something happened with the logs while attempting to mount the partition which leads me to a more narrowed in set of commands to pass the btrfs program. I end up doing a btrfs check --repair <parition device> which gets me booted back into CachyOS.

During that process I was warned quite sternly that I should only perform that check –repair if advised to do so by a developer. I’m kind of impatient though and I don’t immediately see any other option for me. I tried to get fsck to fix the superblock but it did nothing. So in the back of my mind I have this lingering fear that my install is now tainted. I figure the least I can do is refresh my snapshot. I’d hate for it to link to something invalid now that I did that repair operation. Now I’ve got a computer that works and am all set up on it. The CachyOS issues are all gone, right? RIGHT?!?!

Not quite… but I don’t know what the issue is yet as it’s only happened once. Last night while I was just sitting in station in EVE and chatting, I bluescreened. Yes… I bluescreened in a GNU/Linux operating system. I don’t know what to do at this point, the Linux kernel has NEVER panic’ed on me before so I never knew this screen even existed. I sit in shock for quite a while thinking about what to do. I reboot and get back into Cachy and start inspecting… my prior boot’s dmesg gets truncated at 17:47 on the previous day but this event happened around 22:20 that night… This sucks, so what the hell caused my kernel to panic? I guess I’ll not know until the next crash… maybe.

So, after that two part long story I’ve brought you up to speed with my drama in Linux land. Even with all of these problems I’d still rather be running Linux than Windows. Let that sink in.