Hard drive crash and reinstall
Introduction
So here I was, playing Snowrunner on my Linux system, when the image froze. My OS drive just wasn’t working anymore.
But kind of in a weird way, it is a NVME drive, and for some reason it cannot be booted on anymore, but it’s fine having the root partition mounted, go figure…
After buying a new NVME drive (bigger, faster), this blog post is basically a log of what I did to reinstall the system. It is mainly destined to my future self (hopefully not too soon), but it might be interesting to others.
I’m not going to try and be generic in the instructions, so here’s that.
Installing the OS
Getting started
After “burning” the latest ISO on a USB key, press F11 to select the USB key as the boot target.
Select: Archlinux installation (UEFI)
loadkeys fr-bepo
timedatectl set-timezone Europe/Paris
Partitioning the disks
# list disks
fdisk -l
# we will install on nvme0n1
# to check if "Best" is in use
nvme id-ns -H /dev/nvme0n1|grep "Relative Performance"
# start getting real
fdisk /dev/nvme0n1
# create GPT table
g
Partitions
1: EFI System (type 1) 1 Gb
n +1G t 1 EFI System
2: SWAP (type 19) 16 Gb
n +16G t 19 (swap)
3: /boot (type 23) 1 Gb
n +1G t 23 linux root x86_64
4: / (type 23) tout ce qui reste
n t 23 linux root x86_64
Summary
p1 EFI p2 swap p3 /boot p4 /
Formatting
# EFI is FAT32
mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/nvme0n1p1
mkswap /dev/nvme0n1p2
# /boot is ext4
mkfs.ext4 /dev/nvme0n1p3
# encrypt root partition
cryptsetup -y -v luksFormat /dev/nvme0n1p4
cryptsetup open /dev/nvme0n1p4 root
mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/root
Mount new partitions
mount /dev/mapper/root /mnt
# mount /boot too
mount --mkdir /dev/nvme0n1p3 /mnt/boot
# efi is mounted at /efi
mount --mkdir /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/efi
# activate swap
swapon /dev/nvme0n1p2
Start installation
# select best mirrors
reflector -latest 10 --country Netherlands,Germany,France --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
# install base system
pacstrap -K /mnt base linux linux-firmware
genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
arch-chroot /mnt
Follow https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide.
vconsole.conf:
KEYMAP=fr-bepo XKBLAYOUT=fr XKBMODEL=bepo
mkinitcpio: edit the .conf to add encrypt hook
install grub and efibootmgr:
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/efi --bootloader-id=GRUB
Install amd-ucode and regenerate grub config:
pacman -S amd-ucode
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
use blkid for the device uuid
Internet
Last important step of the install:
pacman -S dhcpcd
systemctl enable dhcpcd
Set password for root account
passwd
Reboot
We’re all done, now we reboot and hope everything is good!
Pacman
In /etc/pacman.conf add ILoveCandy and set ParallelDownloads to 5.
Essential packages
pacman -S git vim zsh tmux nodejs yarn
git clone --recursive https://github.com/NicolasCARPi/.dotfiles
bash .dotfiles/install.sh
# install vim plugins
vim
:PlugInstall
File manager
pacman -S pcmanfm gvfs
In preferences:
General: check Open files with single click, View Mode: Compact View Display: Always show full file names Layout: uncheck Desktop and Applications Advanced: Terminal emulator: urxvt
Screens management
pacman -S arandr
Sudo
Instead of using sudo, we install doas: pacman -S doas
With /etc/doas.conf:
permit persist :wheel
And set restrictive permissions:
doas chmod 400 /etc/doas.conf
Setting the timezone and hostname
This one is easy and straightforward:
ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Paris /etc/localtime
hwclock --systohc
hostnamectl hostname ryzen
Hosts
Content of /etc/hosts:
127.0.0.1 elab.local
::1 elab.local
Locales
Let’s generate the locales:
# use vi as vim is not yet installed ;)
vim /etc/locale.gen
# uncomment en_US.UTF-8
locale-gen
Sound
For sound we use pipewire with wireplumber and pulseaudio, because sound on Linux is very simple and straightforward…
pacman -S pipewire wireplumber pulseaudio pavucontrol
systemctl --user --now enable wireplumber
In pavucontrol, disable the HDMI output.
Music
pacman -S mpd mpc ncmpcpp
ln -s /mnt/data/var/music/lib ~/.music
Main apps
pacman -S man mesa xf86-video-amdgpu vulkan-mesa-layers vulkan-radeon xorg-xinit xcompmgr unclutter rxvt-unicode awesome firefox chromium gnupg mutt ruby sshfs conky zip unzip unrar p7zip xarchiver pinentry lxappearance w3m docker docker-compose filezilla pass python-pip borg xclip make gcc curl
Content of .xinitrc:
xcompmgr -c &
mpd
gpg-agent --daemon
unclutter -b --timeout 30
conky
exec awesome
Theming
In ~/.themes extract https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1934110 and use lxappearance to set it.
Fonts
pacman -S ttf-dejavu ttf-freefont adobe-source-code-pro-fonts freetype2 noto-fonts noto-fonts-extra noto-fonts-cjk
Miscellaneous packages
gem install tmuxinator jekyll
pacman -S vlc libreoffice-fresh gpicview evince htop scrot gimp baobab filezilla php-cli picard cmatrix rsync
Yay
To use doas with yay, use this:
yay --sudo doas --sudoflags -- --save
Now try startx!