Awesome - thank you! I knew about yay, but wanted to understand it in case yay ever disappears like yaourt did. I did not know about the others!
Kongar
joined 2 years ago
Sigh, my condolences. I’m shouting right beside you. I first learned about linux in 1993 in college. I got it working on a shiny new 486 with super vga graphics. We were allowed access to the college’s aix mainframes and thus the internet via a slip connection - but only through Unix like systems. Linux was amazing, I couldn’t believe we had x going, and loading up cad, matlab, maple, ftp, fsp, irc, nettrek, and everything else possible in the computer centers - but over a telephone line from our apartment.
Magical.
Funny how it really only became my daily driver three ish years ago - despite using it forever. Cuz games - glad that’s changed finally.
If you can, dual boot with two hard drives. Windows will work when linux doesn’t/you break it. Learn linux, distro hop, figure it out - and you’ll be able to learn at your own pace.
This is the way. My advice is to add a second hard drive to your pc and install linux on that. Distro hop, install arch and break it horribly, swear at your printer, learn. Then when you screw up, you’ve lost nothing, you can switch back to your “‘ol faithful” and get the job done. What will eventually happen is you’ll find yourself spending more time in linux than windows until you almost never boot it up.
If you do it this way, there’s really only two things to worry about. 1) if you’re using mbr or want to still use mbr with uefi, you’ll have trouble dual booting cleanly and will probably want to reinstall windows. You can’t break anything, but you can’t dual boot from both methods (or at least I’m pretty sure I’ve never owned a motherboard that can). 2) when installing linux, learn and be careful about what drive contains windows - don’t ever pick that drive when formatting and partitioning. Bonus points if it’s a different brand and size - makes it almost impossible to pick the wrong drive. When using a single drive for dual booting, there’s much more opportunity to make a mistake and break your windows install if you’re not familiar with partitioning and boot loaders.
I literally can’t think of a way to break windows if you keep the above in mind, and then you can “make the switch” gradually.
Good for you, welcome aboard!
The boot order is uefi hdd (which I can then pick the hard drive’s boot order in a sub menu), then uefi usb, then uefi optical drive, then network. I don’t think that’s the issue - it should always find something to boot before the optical drive.
I’m going to try the one drive at a time in that first port thing and add/move the rest around. I haven’t been as deliberate with the troubleshooting here as I should have (I immediately went towards a software issue - fstab or something similar). I could have a port / mobo problem. Need to separate software from hardware issue better. Luckily I have three installed operating systems on three drives and plenty of bootable isos to play with. ;)
Thanks for all the help! Lots of good suggestions in this thread I can try for further troubleshooting. Most importantly, you all confirmed I should be able to unplug an optical drive, put in a new unformatted ssd, and generally move drives around - and linux should still boot. I did not think things would behave that way, so when I had issues I figured it’s of course pilot error. Also explains why I was having such a hard time finding information on the arch wiki ;)
Now I know something ain’t right, and my guess is its some user configuration (because it does boot, it just hangs later). This has now turned into a side project (what the heck did I break), I’ll update the thread if I figure it out. It’s a pretty clean install, very few AUR packages (mostly flatpaks), and has been otherwise pretty stable-it’ll be interesting to see how it actually broke.
Thanks for the suggestions!
That I have not tried. I’ll try moving them around and see if it’s an issue with that port.
I’ve moved drives to that one port, but I haven’t tried shuffling all the components around.
My understanding with sata was that I should be able to move things around all I want. What would change is sda sdb sdc etc, and that’s why you use uuids in fstab. So it was strange to me that I couldn’t plug drives into that first port.
I’ll shuffle things around more when I get home and see if I can detect any further patterns.
Edit: as far as I can tell that port is nothing special other than it’s the first one. All the same in bios.
I’ll have to try this
I tried logging into gui and it hangs. While I’m at the spinning cursor of death, I cannot break out into a console. I’ll try the console first.
I suspect you are onto the issue here - something in user config is looking for that optical drive and failing.
Fstab has just hard drives, and it’s by uuid.
I’m at work now, I can boot into manjaro by unplugging the drive - I’ll check the logs and see if there’s any clues there.
It does not-that was the first thing I went after. I thought (incorrectly) that optical drives were in fstab and I was surprised to see only my hard drives there. Then I learned a bit more, sr0, etc and was like hmm, I’m missing something. ;)
Did that. fstab uses uuid for identification. If I plug ANY of my drives into that sata port where the optical drive was - manjaro won’t get past login.
Maybe my manjaro installation is borked and I don’t even know it (it’s actually been pretty good for a while now)
yup the automating the mirror thing is new to me - gonna try that! Thanks!
I do this like once every week or two. On a sunday when I'm drinking my first morning coffee and have time. Doesn't take long. Maybe 10 minutes. Most time consuming bits are reading the wiki, checking the log file for errors, and if something in the AUR needs updating - checking the scripts (but let's be honest - I don't do that every single time. What I do is sometimes different than what I should do).