Revive Arch Linux Install

When your install is totally borked and you need a working system fast…

Interrupting a -Syu in the middle of an upgrade often leaves the system in an inconsistent state that can be difficult—or impossible—to recover from cleanly. This guide assumes a typical systemd-boot Arch Linux setup.

The main goal is to reinstall all packages to ensure every file that should exist is properly restored.

Steps#

• Boot from an Arch or Arch-based live environment.

• Mount your system to /mnt and your EFI system partition to /mnt/boot.

• Enter your install with arch-chroot /mnt.

• Reinstall all packages:

  pacman -Qqn | pacman -S -

There’s also a more targeted method using paccheck --md5sum --quiet to identify broken packages, but this can fail due to hook-based kernel population in /boot and similar cases. If you have the bandwidth, doing a full reinstall of all packages is the simplest and most reliable option.