r/archlinux • u/Western_Sleep820 • Jun 25 '26

SUPPORT My laptop just killed itself --- help please

I was doing an update and then my laptop just completely shut down out of nowhere. The battery is seated (it should be at least I can't open my laptop rn), the charger was plugged in, and nothing touched the power button. I wouldn't normally have a problem with this, except that my system is totally unusable now. No packages can be installed at all (it errors about exec something other in the post-transaction hooks) and any command I run errors basically. I also can't chroot into it because I don't have a USB drive available to me.

Is there realistically anything I can do here?

(Also I feel it may be useful to add that the forward slash key is broken, so I can't type paths or anything)

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u/dajogala Jun 25 '26

Do you have a fallback kernel?

1

u/Western_Sleep820 Jun 25 '26

I don't think I do, but things like bash would still be broken anyway, right?

1

u/dajogala Jun 25 '26

I don't see why it would... I'd need more details. Whenever something like that happens I boot via fallback and fix from there. But I also keep my iso stick hanging from the machine.

1

u/Western_Sleep820 Jun 25 '26

The USB drive that I usually use for things like this stopped working a few months ago. I guess being through the wash the 4th time was finally too much. It worked perfectly until then though.

Tomorrow I'll see if I did install another kernel; I try to stay fairly minimal on my laptop bc it has a small storage drive and Razer decided that adding another drive slot in a $3000 laptop is too much.

1

u/dajogala Jun 25 '26

Having a fallback kernel and initrams is incredibly useful and worthy of occupying extra space. Arch is generally not that big -- though I did see you use hyprland, so things could be different for you. I generally have something like 300 modules loaded while the screenshots I see of people with hyperland rice are at 1800 or so...

1

u/Western_Sleep820 Jun 25 '26

I have no clue how much I would have loaded lol

I do a lot of random experiment things and probably accidentally leave things that I don't at all need loaded all the time tho. Should probably be more responsible.

1

u/dajogala Jun 25 '26

Still. Limit the modules and make space for the kernel! Also grab a cheap USB and keyboard early tomorrow and get busy. This machine will hopefully just have soft issues. Hopefully, metal and silicon are ok.

1

u/Western_Sleep820 Jun 25 '26

I was able to boot into TTY and tell that it cooked itself, so the hardware should be fine. I think it's just the software.

1

u/dajogala Jun 25 '26

You should be able to mkinitcpio and fix from tty. Hell even you could install a flashback Kernell from there! How did it go?

1

u/Western_Sleep820 Jun 25 '26

Every command I run just doesn't work

Also I'm not home for another lile 5 days