Arch Linux

doghead66

Member

Registered: 2025-06-10

Posts: 16

Repairing old installation after update Systemd issues [Solved]

I recently did a system update on a system with an older installation that most likely has not been updated for at least a year and yes the system did "brick" to some degree. Grub still seems to load and let me enter my disk password but once it starts to boot almost all of the initial systemctl messages says failed. This is a system running UEFI and has the linux zen kernel installed and I did enter the system with a live arch installation to see if I could figure out what the issue was or if there was an incomplete update but I could not really find much. There is a backup of the system that I was planning on using but then I figured out it was out of date and some important files are missing so I would rather try and restore the system before trying to drag a bunch of stuff off and re-install.

Image of what the boot screen looks like:
https://imgdrop.io/image/boot.OQEzi

Last edited by doghead66 (2025-06-10 08:11:22)

doghead66

Member

Registered: 2025-06-10

Posts: 16

Re: Repairing old installation after update Systemd issues [Solved]

tried to see if there was something wrong with fstab but could not find anything unordinary towards the beginning of boot it looks like it is failing to mount a lot of things like the FUSE control file system and Kernel configuration file system

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 64,447

Re: Repairing old installation after update Systemd issues [Solved]

Looks somewhat like  https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=306077 which was down to a broken/stale libxml2 and corrupted /usr/bin/groups
Please check the package integrity.

The most common cause for this kind of issue (failing mounts) is however booting a kernel that's out of sync w/ the installed one (because you forgot to mount the /boot partition or mounted a spurious one)

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doghead66

Member

Registered: 2025-06-10

Posts: 16

Re: Repairing old installation after update Systemd issues [Solved]

Thank you for the reply but the system was so old that I just opted to take a backup of the home directory and do a fresh install