Re: How to repair/reinstall guix on foreign distro

[Joshua Branson <jbranso@dismail.de>]

Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@freenet.de> writes:

> 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.

If you are convinced on using guix on a foreign distro...then you could
create a separate partition for /gnu/store and /var/guix.  Then mount
those at boot time.   That way at least, you could not have to manually
run fsck at an initramfs.  You could do it when you've logged into
ubuntu's gnome (or whatever it is that you use.)

I wish I could be more helpful.

-- 
Joshua Branson (joshuaBPMan in #guix)
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