Can't log in or start session
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I turn on the computer, it boots ok. I can decrypt the drive ok. That gets me to my log-in screen.
That's where the trouble starts. When I enter the correct password, it almost appears to be starting, because the log-in screen disappears. But then it reappears. (When I enter a bad password, it says 'Invalid password', so we know that's not the issue.)
If I boot into the Recovery Menu and query system status, I see 'LVM state. Physical volumes: not ok (BAD)'
dpkg and fsck do nothing, but that could be to do with the drive being an encrypted one
I notice when I'm getting to the Recovery menu, I decrypt the drive from the command line (rather than from the GUI if I were not booting into recovery mode), then I see 'volume group trisquel-vg not found' and 'cannot.process volume group trisquel-vg'
Are you using Aramo (Trisquel 11) or Ecne (Trisquel 12)? Is it with KDE, Mate, or the lxde environment?
You should be able to login into a terminal (tty3) by pressing CTRL+ALT+F3 .
Oh yes that Ctrl+Alt+F3 thing works, thank you.
When I run xfs_repair on the root partition I see 'bad primary superblock' and it fails to repair it.
Same utility shows the home partition is fine.
Is there a way to rebuild the root partition without touching the home partition?
I am a translator!
> When I run xfs_repair on the root partition I see 'bad primary superblock' and it fails to repair it.
What does lsblk --fs say? I am asking because it seems to me that by default, the root filesystem was using ext4 and not xfs.
trisquel@trisquel:~$ sudo file -s /dev/mapper/trisquel--vg-root
/dev/mapper/trisquel--vg-root: symbolic link to ../dm-1
trisquel@trisquel:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/mapper/trisquel--vg-root
Disk /dev/mapper/trisquel--vg-root: 18.6 GiB, 19998441472 bytes, 39059456 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Maybe there's a way I can resize the partition to make it work like Flup's answer here: https://serverfault.com/questions/509852/cant-mount-xfs-partition-anymore#509894 ???
> I see 'volume group trisquel-vg not found' and 'cannot.process volume group trisquel-vg'
I too see these messages on my system. I don't worry about them, because cryptsetup decrypts successfully then.
If I were you I would back up the important stuff to another storage drive before continuing. You should be able to decrypt and mount your lvm volumes from a live CD.
Can you no longer boot your computer? It maybe be best to do a reinstall. I don't know what that is about on serverfault.
> Can you no longer boot your computer? It maybe be best to do a reinstall.
Depends on the definition of 'boot'. I cannot start a session as the user, so I can't use my laptop.
A reinstall wouldn't be terrible, as I'm not losing any data; like I said home partition is ok, root partition is banjaxed. But if I can repair the root partition, that would save me time.
Is there some known way to back up the home partition in toto on an external drive and slap that in to the new install? That would be nice.
If you do not mess up, I believe a backup is not necessary: you ask Trisquel's installer to use the existing partition for /home with*out* formatting it. With the "Something else" "Installation type" of the graphical installer, it is a box to uncheck in the partitioning step. Later in the installation process, recreate the same first user (with id 1000). Everything should be fine. I write "should" because I have not used encrypted partitions for many versions.
That said, you would feel much more at ease backing the user data up before reinstalling. You can certainly do that from a terminal, such as the one you got with Ctrl+Alt+F3. If you have not setup a backup system, you may use sudo tar (sudo for owners and permissions to be preserved):
$ sudo tar --zstd -cvf [dest]/backup.tar.zst /home
The path to a directory on a large-enough partition that the installation will not overwrite should substitute "[dest]". If automount works, you may simply type "/media" and rely on auto-completion (the Tab key) several times to find the desired directory on an external disk (or on a USB key). If you are not comfortable with the command line, you may play a little with a small directory before making the backup of /home, which will take time if there are many large files. The option --zstd will save some time (beside space) though.
EDIT: I have just realize you need not use the command line, if you can boot the graphical environment of Trisquel's live system. There, using the graphical file manager, you can mount the filesystem for /home and graphically back its files up on an external drive. If the archive manager does not propose the creation of a .tar.zst file, choose .zip instead.
As I wrote, if you reinstall Trisquel specifying the current partition for /home but *not* formatting it, the backup should be useless. If it ends up being useful, you can restore the backup on the newly installed system using the same command as above but replacing the option c (short for --create) with the option x (short for --extract). Then, you should definitely setup a proper backup system, such as Back In Time, by default in Trisquel. Configure it so that it will regularly (e.g., every day or whenever the external drive is plugged in) make a backup, only sending the files that have changed or have been created since the last backup.
Great answer, Banana, thank you Banana