I present the following information without any expectation of assistance; I think my system is borked and I don't have the requisite skill to recover, I fear. The bottom line is that, while I am deeply committed to Archlinux based distributions, my experience, just recently, has shown a sad level of incompatibility. In the future, I shall probably use Archlinux itself---although it is incredibly difficult to install---or perhaps CachyOS, which looks interesting, IF those developers are able to overcome the lack of support for older, still functional, Nvidia hardware---or maybe it's back to Ubuntu, with regrets and some trepidation due to several bad experiences many years ago. Apologies must be given for the long-winded travelogue of this journey.
I am currently trying to recover from two cataclysmic (to me) computer fails:
- I wrote an iso image over the only SSD of my older Thinkpad S1 Yoga, leaving this system in a precarious state: the files are mostly accessible, so I have copied what I can over to an external drive. Inexplicably (to me) the threat seem to be that if I shut the system off, the partition structure will be gone. This happened when I was using dd to write an iso of a distro to a flash drive; but stupidly I did not double check, and the "of" was the main ssd of the machine.
- After a dance with the devil---installing Manjaro, then CachyOS, which will not run with my older Nvidia GPU, then Manjaro again (unfortunately Entangle will not build on Manjaro these days, for reasons I have temporarily lost track of)---I attempted to install Archlinux itself using the touted "archinstall" script on the install cd. This script has some issues, mainly in the partitioning section. It was not clear (to me) that once I had specified the partitions, the "/home" partition I have carried around for decades would be deleted.
This is a peculiar mess. I had moved from Manjaro, which I ran faithfully for over a decade, to EndeavourOS, which I do not like, but which does enable the building of Entangle (maybe because it uses Arch repos, and not delayed as on Manjaro). EndeavourOS is currently offline due to non-payment of hosting fees; one does not know whether some incompatibility due to this lapse led to a serious problem after making a relatively routine change, I don't remember what. For now, it's all academic, as far as EndeavourOS is concerned.
I was running out of options, as I have come to lean heavily on Archlinux derivatives, and I don't know enough about others to choose among them. CachyOS is at #1 on the Distrowatch hitlist, but many reports indicate that this Nvidia problem is real, and big.
I decided to bite the bullet and try to install Archlinux. A couple of Youtube videos later, and I elected to try the "archinstall" script on the CD, method that's been around a while. I ran into problems at the partitioning stage. For one, once I entered something into the wrong partition, it was impossible to delete and abandon that widget; rather I entered "/extra" to see what happened. But the real problem was that the idea of turning on and off changes to the partition that was selected was unclear and confusing. And, the recommended keystrokes did nothing. So I just moved ahead, and hit "intall".
Immediately I saw that two partitions were deleted, my "/home" partition, and the intended root partition. I bailed out at this point, and installed manjaro.
Manjaro and Endeavour do not have recent enough kernels and modules to support my cheap USB wifi dongle; cachyOS does, and so did this arch live CD. Luckily I have a 50' Ethernet cable, and I was able to update the kernel on Manjaro, and install the needed module, so wifi is now working (The Alfa rtl8812au unit was cheap and works across my apartment, and with a recent enough kernel it is supported).
I am now attempting to learn an entire subdiscipline of computer science, storage partition schemes, in a day, to attempt to recover the decades worth of data on my former "/home" paritition on a 2T NVME stick. Hopefully the rest will not be affected; two other partitions hold a T of images.
I present this as a matter of potential interest on the BLUG discussion group. I don't expect to be able to recover from this. Half of this was my doing, but the Laptop can be reconstructed, well enough; the desktop situation I blame on the archinstall script's relative unfriendliness, and my own naivity.
--
‘As we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others we should be
glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours, and
this we should do freely and generously.'
---- Benjamin Franklin
[I was born during the 1940s plateau, with [CO2] at 310PPM.]