Arch Linux

WhoseLow

Member

Registered: 2021-09-15

Posts: 1

Timeshift restore failing to mount device

I screwed up my system somewhere in either display manager or xorg and want to roll back to a few days ago when it was still working fine. I've been using timeshift to backup my system on a regular basis but this is the first time I've had to restore from a backup.

Booting into a live usb and installing + running timeshift --restore gives the error:

Continue with restore? (y/n): y
Mounted '/dev/nvme0n1p5' at '/run/timeshift/restore/'
E: Failed to mount device '/dev/nvme0n1p5' at mount point '/run/timeshift/restore/'
E: mount: /run/timeshift/restore: /dev/nvme0n1p5 already mounted on /run/timeshift/restore.

and booting into my main system after uninstalling display manager and getting cli only gives pretty much the same thing but the partition is already mounted on /

I also tried using the GUI on a manjaro live usb with a pre-intsalled DE but it gave me the less informative error: "Failed to mount devices"

Any help is appreciated, thanks!

AFatNut21

Member

Registered: 2021-09-06

Posts: 37

Re: Timeshift restore failing to mount device

I am thinking that timeshift can't be ran from a chroot environment because it wants to mount something again when it has been already mounted manually; I could be wrong about this. Timeshift, as I don't think arch live comes with it or any kind of live installment that I know of. What about if you tried uninstalling xorg,(of course backing up any kind of configurations you created to a spare USB flash drive), install xorg back onto it and slowly feed whatever you configured into the files. Of course observing the code to make sure that there isn't any errors. The same thing with whichever DM you installed. And next time, I highly recommend using a SSD as a backup, or backup your initramfs, grub, kernel config.

monkeyseeA

Member

Registered: 2023-05-18

Posts: 1

Re: Timeshift restore failing to mount device

I will tell you how I solved my issue. I royalty messed up my system after a script got hung for a changing of my username for the main admin account in multiple files. This locked me out unable to met correct login credentials. I "force-moved" all the root files of the last update recover before the issues
E.G.:
    mv -f /run/timeshift/backup/timeshift/snapshots/2023-05-13_17-55-48/* /

Right after this I logged out and logged back in.
Did  restart.
Upon the new logon after booting, once this happens.

Now before doing this i kept reaching the "Unable to mount devices".

But after this little trick.
Open TimeShift, Click the very first (earliest dated) boot to recover...
If this does not work, close TimeShift and repeat for the next.

Eventually the files will match close enough to the files you already forced to your root and will back you up to a new restore..

This was a do or die situation for me because I spent 3 hours setting up my Fedora Server, before I broke the system. Luckily, placed a TimeShift backup before setting up the server. May of lost my 3 hours of work, but recovered 3 months of time and files.