Re: How to repair/reinstall guix on foreign distro

[Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@freenet.de>]

On Mon, 17 May 2021 22:23:03 -0400
Joshua Branson <jbranso@dismail.de> wrote:

> Is ubuntu causing this issue?  Why are you seeing an initramfs prompt
> every few weeks?  If you are running guix on ubuntu...that seems like
> it's ubuntu's fault.  Though I'm probably way wrong.

If there are filesystem errors on boot, you get a initramfs shell that
allows running fsck on root for repairs. Sometimes, some files can’t be
fixed. 

The system resides on a Transcend 256GB MTE110S SSD. Now one would
probably assume that SSD is faulty. What’s curious is that so far, any
and all noticeable corruption has been limited to guix-related files!
smartctl repports "overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED"
and has "No Errors Logged". Full output attached at the end.

It does however claim that all except one power cylce has been an unsafe
shutdown, even though I had only a few hard resets and usually shutdown
by issuing `poweroff`. Searching the web for this issue led me to
turning off fast boot in the BIOS, but that didn’t help.


I would still like to have a minimal invasive way to get beyond:
```
guix pull: error: Git error: invalid data in index - incorrect header
signature
```
Or a way to to remove/replace /gnu/store from the running system.


```
~: sudo smartctl -x /dev/nvme0n1p2
[sudo] password for thorwil: 
smartctl 7.1 2019-12-30 r5022 [x86_64-linux-5.8.0-53-generic] (local
build) Copyright (C) 2002-19, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke,
www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Number:                       TS256GMTE110S
Serial Number:                      G286710001
Firmware Version:                   S0905C3
PCI Vendor/Subsystem ID:            0x126f
IEEE OUI Identifier:                0x000000
Controller ID:                      1
Number of Namespaces:               1
Namespace 1 Size/Capacity:          256.060.514.304 [256 GB]
Namespace 1 Formatted LBA Size:     512
Local Time is:                      Tue May 18 09:23:26 2021 CEST
Firmware Updates (0x12):            1 Slot, no Reset required
Optional Admin Commands (0x0007):   Security Format Frmw_DL
Optional NVM Commands (0x001f):     Comp Wr_Unc DS_Mngmt Wr_Zero
Sav/Sel_Feat Maximum Data Transfer Size:         64 Pages
Warning  Comp. Temp. Threshold:     83 Celsius
Critical Comp. Temp. Threshold:     90 Celsius

Supported Power States
St Op     Max   Active     Idle   RL RT WL WT  Ent_Lat  Ex_Lat
 0 +     9.00W       -        -    0  0  0  0        0       0

Supported LBA Sizes (NSID 0x1)
Id Fmt  Data  Metadt  Rel_Perf
 0 +     512       0         0

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning:                   0x00
Temperature:                        48 Celsius
Available Spare:                    88%
Available Spare Threshold:          10%
Percentage Used:                    0%
Data Units Read:                    1.136.204 [581 GB]
Data Units Written:                 1.901.390 [973 GB]
Host Read Commands:                 15.204.795
Host Write Commands:                18.097.210
Controller Busy Time:               1.386
Power Cycles:                       276
Power On Hours:                     1.214
Unsafe Shutdowns:                   275
Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
Error Information Log Entries:      0
Warning  Comp. Temperature Time:    0
Critical Comp. Temperature Time:    0

Error Information (NVMe Log 0x01, max 64 entries)
No Errors Logged
```

-- 
Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@freenet.de>