I recently made a post discussing my move to Linux on Fedora, and it’s been going great. But today I think I have now become truly part of this community. I ran a command that borked my bootloader and had to do a fresh install. Learned my lesson with modifying the bootloader without first doing thorough investigation lol.
Fortunately I kept my /home on its own partition, so this shouldn’t be too bad to get back up and running as desired.
Before you can fix a bootloader, you first need to learn how to install and set up a bootloader. I think most people learn that part when they try Arch
In my first few weeks of linux I screwed up mounting a hard drive and my pc wouldn’t boot past grub. 4x different times I tried and each time I broke it. Then a year later I revisted mounting the drive and it went smoothly.
Few days ago I downgraded glibc(I’m dumdum) because it was recommended in a reddit thread for a problem I was having. I couldn’t even chroot. Fortunately I could update with pacman --root
If you keep around a bootable rescue stick like System Rescue it has a boot menu entry that will boot the Linux installed on your machine. Once you do that you can run a command or two to reinstall the bootloader. You can search the net or whatever at leisure since it will work fully.
Alternatively, if your system Linux is borked harder, you can boot the rescue Linux and use more advanced methods, depending on what’s wrong. The rescue Linux also has a graphical environment with browser if you need it.
At the very least sometimes you can figure out what went wrong. It may not be much comfort if you lost your system but at least you learn what not to do in the future. Too many people just say “oh, it just broke” and leave it at that.
I think I know what the issue was… I modified the grub.cfg file and ran grub2-mkconfig and I think it was saying it detected a Linux install at my root partition, but didn’t seem to recognize my /boot or /boot/efi partitions and I couldn’t figure out how to edit that via the grub cli. If that wasn’t the case, then that’s okay. I’ll make sure to teach myself a bit more about the bootloader before trying to edit it again
Sweet, welcome! :) I know the feeling. I just finished reinstalling Nobara after being dumb and goofing up patching. Then I tried to fix it and made the system totally unusable and I gave up.
A while ago I jacked my grub config and decided to try to fix it manually. I managed to stumble through it and learned some stuff, though I am still fuzzy on some details.
I mostly want to just use the computer without a lot of headache and both Mint and Nobara have been great for coding (various), electronics design, 3d modeling and printing, graphics, photo editing, and such.
This is why I gave up on fixing it yesterday lol. I spent a few days setting it up, I didn’t wanna spend a few more days to try to figure out exactly what the issue was when I could just give in and then actually use it
Totally valid! Theoretically with more experience it may be easier / faster to fix but…idk
See this is why I keep /home on a separate partition (or drive in some cases). I can reinstall or switch distros anytime without worrying about all my files (they’re backed up, anyway but doing a restore is a pita).
Although I think having to fix a borked bootloader is a good bit of experience, it's probably not something you are always going to want to spend time on. I have used boot-repair only once, but it was like magic. Just throwing it out there for your future use and a general recommendation. :)
I’ve messed up my system so many times over the years that now I think I secretly get excited when it accidentally happens. Maybe I’m a masochist, but I actually enjoy trying to understand what went wrong. A USB stick with a light weight Linux distro and chroot you can usually get back in there and look around at the damage.
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