i was going to make some kind of joke about maybe computer bugs but i need to be able find this later too jdsjd

5/9/26: Emergency Shell

• you guys are going to love this one because it happened to me yesterday and ohohhh boy...that was a fun misadventure that lasted all morning.
• overview of error: cannot find dev/mapper/cryptluks..skipping fsck..cannot find root=/dev/mapper/cryptluks yada yada no block device tty has been disabled, dropping you into emergency shell

approach to what may have been broken:

• corruption of linux image / HDD <- cause i could input my psswd for luks just not after it unlocked
• the packages itself that i installed from repos caused it to break <- as sometimes newer packages can cause kernel panic
• the mkinitcpio conf that i touched before reboot after my installed packages cause i replaced it with the pacnew that was made (because i saw it from my terminal).. <- encrypt is not a default hook so that messed up things quite a bit!

what i actually had to do:

• drop into live iso from my USB
• mount both my /boot and /mnt for my encrypted hard drive
  • the way that needs to be done for encrypted disks is creating a cryptroot
• chroot and rebuild the linux install
• regenerate the initramfs
• all has to been done in chroot so i kept forgetting not to exit first
• unmount the /mnt
  • typically that solves normal corruption but in my case...
• the hooks file needed to be edited to include 'encrypt'
• the other problem lied in not having my keyfile from root being pointed to as well. im not really sure why(?) as it is not the case for others who had a similar bug, but i thought it was for my default keyrings <- after looking it up it is important to luks to be able to open the stored password without multiple requests ooooh.

what i learned from this:

• not to touch that damn conf file again
• more under the hood about what luks does and in handling chroot because i didn't need to do that yet for anything
• i got pretty lucky that it wasn't a hard drive failure cause this thing is going on almost its sixth year of usage, and because i bought it refurbished second-hand.

5/9/26: Recreating Swap

• overview of error: swap disabled after i logged back in

approach to what may have been broken:

• i saw that there was 18gb worth of encryption for my primary disk, but that shouldn't have been the case since luks opens at boot after my psswd
• honestly i also considered dirtyfrag because there isn't a patch for it right now and is the latest exploit, and devices can be attacked locally
• my third partition was also encrypted with luks when i checked it out in my terminal <- i think because i accidentally mounted it in live USB with a passwd, but luckily i used the same one to open it again

what i actually had to do:

• recreate the swap using the partition
• add it to fstab using the UUID <- i really like doing it this way so it helps me keep the partitions organized
• add flags for swap
  • so what's interesting is that it doesn't have 'defaults' so it's none swap sw 00

what i learned from this:

• how to make swap in case i need to do again (and most likely) in the future
• the difference between the default flags and the numbers indicated at the end that display it in the bootloader