ArchLinux - Save face (and your system)

Whatever boot issue you're facing or system breakage you encounter, that would be neat to be able to fix you system rather than reinstalling it, isn't it?

I'll give you a few hints to do that, especially if you have a setup similar to mine.

I hope you have an AL USB key ready to go.

Unless you have an English qwerty keyboard, don't forget to change your keyboard layout for a good start.

loadkeys fr

You can use lsblk -f to identify your ESP and your root partition.

In case of an encrypted partition, unlock it (eg. LVM on LUKS).

cryptsetup open /dev/sdc2 cryptlvm

Mount the root partition then the ESP (and swap if you have one).

mount /dev/myvg2/root /mnt
swapon /dev/myvg2/swap
mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/efi

Let's change root into the system to be saved:

arch-chroot /mnt

That may not be a bad idea to drop privileges to normal user to prevent accidents. With great power comes great responsibility.

su noraj

If planning to fix boot images and having a bind mount, one doesn't want to forget to mount it before generating initramfs images or something.

sudo mount --bind /efi/EFI/arch /boot

Finally, please try anything in your power to save that poor system.