Arch Linux

adr77

Member

From: Israel

Registered: 2023-10-28

Posts: 164

[SOLVED] sketchy laptop battery causes system failure

hello again! so following up on the same laptop, my ThinkPad T480s, that I bought refurbished, turns out to have a sketchy sorta battery and likes to turn off on itself, claiming the battery has gone down to 0% and shuts off on the spot.

the issue is that it tuned off in the middle of an Arch upgrade (pacman -Syu), and after rebooting using the fallback initramfs (the standard option isn't booting), this happens when I run the updater:

andaro@olympus ~]$ sudo pacman -Syu
[sudo] password for andaro: 
:: Synchronizing package databases...
error: failed to synchronize all databases (unable to lock database)

something I could do? please help...

Last edited by adr77 (2024-11-09 18:18:08)

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"A good attitude will always take you further than a bad habit." -Isabelle, Animal Crossing: New Leaf
meet the rig and the surprise:
monolith: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X | ASUS TUF RTX 4070 | 32GB DDR4 | DIY
olympus: Intel Core i5-8350U | Intel HD Graphics 620 | 16GB DDR4 | ThinkPad T480s

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,232

Re: [SOLVED] sketchy laptop battery causes system failure

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman … )%22_error

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Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael Faraday
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. -- Alan Turing
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How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

adr77

Member

From: Israel

Registered: 2023-10-28

Posts: 164

Re: [SOLVED] sketchy laptop battery causes system failure

okay, that fixed the pacman issue, but I still can't boot normally, GRUB spews this error out when I boot the standard Arch Linux option (stock Linux kernel):

Loading Linux linux ...
Loading initial ramdisk ...
error: you need to load the kernel first.

Press any key to continue...

then it just freezes.

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"A good attitude will always take you further than a bad habit." -Isabelle, Animal Crossing: New Leaf
meet the rig and the surprise:
monolith: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X | ASUS TUF RTX 4070 | 32GB DDR4 | DIY
olympus: Intel Core i5-8350U | Intel HD Graphics 620 | 16GB DDR4 | ThinkPad T480s

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,232

Re: [SOLVED] sketchy laptop battery causes system failure

Ouch.   My guess would be to boot from the install media, mount your root on /mnt, mount your EFI partition on /mnt/boot, change root with arch-chroot /mnt and and reinstall the the linux package.
Let's hope we are not playing whack-a-mole here with a bunch of corrupted files.

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Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael Faraday
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. -- Alan Turing
---
How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

adr77

Member

From: Israel

Registered: 2023-10-28

Posts: 164

Re: [SOLVED] sketchy laptop battery causes system failure

it wants to play whack-a-drive, the EFI set itself to read-only. what now?

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"A good attitude will always take you further than a bad habit." -Isabelle, Animal Crossing: New Leaf
meet the rig and the surprise:
monolith: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X | ASUS TUF RTX 4070 | 32GB DDR4 | DIY
olympus: Intel Core i5-8350U | Intel HD Graphics 620 | 16GB DDR4 | ThinkPad T480s

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 59,084

Re: [SOLVED] sketchy laptop battery causes system failure

What does that mean? How and where?

journalctl -b | curl -F 'file=@-' 0x0.st

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adr77

Member

From: Israel

Registered: 2023-10-28

Posts: 164

Re: [SOLVED] sketchy laptop battery causes system failure

the EFI partition (I'm my case, /dev/nvme0n1p1), has for some reason locked itself as read-only. I'll get that sorted for you, one moment.

http://0x0.st/oaxK.txt

seems to work now, probably something else.

Last edited by adr77 (2024-11-09 18:17:53)

---

"A good attitude will always take you further than a bad habit." -Isabelle, Animal Crossing: New Leaf
meet the rig and the surprise:
monolith: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X | ASUS TUF RTX 4070 | 32GB DDR4 | DIY
olympus: Intel Core i5-8350U | Intel HD Graphics 620 | 16GB DDR4 | ThinkPad T480s