Arch Linux

vtnh

Member

Registered: 2024-12-29

Posts: 1

Input/Output error after installing KDE plasma (among other issues)

Hi all. I'm new to the forum, so I'm not sure I'm posting in the right place... Anyway, I've lost my hopes of solving this problem, but I think it's important to know the comunity's opinion.
I have arch linux fresh installed, everything is working fine and pacman -Syu tells me everything is up to date. I then decide to install a desktop environment, and choose plasma. The documentation says to install the plasma group. I go ahead and run pacman -S plasma.
Pacman downloads the packages and dependencies, and proceeds to install those packages. However, it crashes middle process and outputs "failed to comit transaction (transaction aborted)". After that, no matter what I type in the shell, I only get "Input/Output error". Can't even reboot or shutdown, so I force the shutdown.
After booting the system again, everything looks fine and I can run commands again. However, for some reason I keep getting error messages about D-Bus not starting. Upon checking with systemctl, it really has reported a fatal error about a file (/usr/share/dbus-1/system.d/org.freedesktop.UDisks2.conf) being empty. I checked with cat only to confirm that the file is indeed empty. I should mention that other files have been emptied, but I prefer not to mention them or I will never stop typing.
Why is this happening? It all seems to be caused by some currupted package that pacman tried to install, but it shouldn't mess with important system files, right? I am so confused, and I will certainly reinstall the entire system, but maybe someone can help me identify the main issue here.
Thank you all in advance.

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 60,889

Re: Input/Output error after installing KDE plasma (among other issues)

It all seems to be caused by some currupted package that pacman tried to install

No.

You first and foremost want to figure what got your into the IO errors.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SMART - "smartctl -x …" to make sure the disk isn't dying on you.

There're frequent APST issues w/ nvme's and APLM issues with SSDs (since many of them optimistically got afforded dipm support)
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_ … ST_support
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_ … Management

but you might also be facing ncq or bus or filesystem issues.

Once that's sorted out, you need to figure what's been corrupted:

sudo LC_ALL=C pacman -Qkk | grep -v ', 0 altered files' | grep -v backup

then re-install those packages to sanitize the system.

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