I pressed leave and now my system is locked up

[FatDroid]

Please help me, I'm going insane here.

I installed Arch earlier, spent ages setting it up and pressed leave to check my lock screen after changing the sddm lockscreen, and it got stuck and became unresponsive.
I shut it down holding the power button, turned it off and turned it back on, still couldn't get in.

Reinstalled Arch after, and I tried pressing leave again, only to run into the same problem.
After pressing leave, I got an underscore thing not doing anything yet again and it stayed there for nearly 5 minutes and became unresponsive, yet again. I've just powered it off, tried powering it on again and it's doing the same again, it gets passed the grub screen, the screen where it says something about how many blocks are used or something and then it gets stuck with the '_' again.

Before I tried changing the sddm screen, I got a time shift image so I know I have a backup form just before that, but please can somebody help me get back in to the system!? I've learnt my lesson now, I won't be changing the lock screen again.

I can't even give any sort of error codes for you to read as I can't open a terminal or anything, because once it gets to that underscore I can't do anything.

 

[dos2unix]

When the grub menu comes up, press the up or down arrow to stop the boot timer.
Go to top line and press [e] key for edit.

You will some lines like (maybe you won't have some of these)
load video
insmod
initrd ... stuff

but you should have a line that begins with linux

It might look like
linux ($root)/vmlinuz-5.14.0-153 of something like that. This line is usually too long to fit on one line of the output.
But find the end of this lin, and just type a "3"
Don't edit the line that begins with initrd.

The end of the line might look like this... rhgb quiet 3

Then press ctrl-x [Control] and [x] t the same time, or press [F10] to boot.
See if you can at least boot into the command line.

 

[theLegionWithin]

odd. I have to wonder what would happen if you used a different greeter than sddm. I'm also on Arch but went with lightdm. it's "ugly" but I've not experienced this issue.

 

[FatDroid]

When the grub menu comes up, press the up or down arrow to stop the boot timer.
Go to top line and press [e] key for edit.

You will some lines like (maybe you won't have some of these)
load video
insmod
initrd ... stuff

but you should have a line that begins with linux

It might look like
linux ($root)/vmlinuz-5.14.0-153 of something like that. This line is usually too long to fit on one line of the output.
But find the end of this lin, and just type a "3"
Don't edit the line that begins with initrd.

The end of the line might look like this... rhgb quiet 3

Then press ctrl-x [Control] and [x] t the same time, or press [F10] to boot.
See if you can at least boot into the command line.

I've done this, I found the line and it had log level=3 and then 'quiet' at the end.
I've removed quiet after taking a picture to remember exactly where to put it back if it doesn't work but it's still doing the same thing, not letting me in.

Thanks for that either way it was worth a try

 

[dos2unix]

Thanks for that either way it was worth a try

Can you ssh to that computer from another computer?

 

[FatDroid]

Can you ssh to that computer from another compute

Can you ssh to that computer from another computer?

I had to reinstall Arch to get round it, I'm now on my third install in 24 hours and I;m at the point where I don't want to change anything in case it messes up again. I didn't even think of trying to access it from a different computer but Id imagine with it being stuck at initializing something, accessing it from a different computer wouldn't do much anyway?

 

[dos2unix]

Id imagine with it being stuck at initializing something, accessing it from a different computer wouldn't do much anyway?

Usually the command will work even if the GUI doesn't. All of the GUI is basically built on top of the command line.
Many times I have been able to SSH into a system that the GUI/Desktop was hosed up. (Not always).

 

[FatDroid]

odd. I have to wonder what would happen if you used a different greeter than sddm. I'm also on Arch but went with lightdm. it's "ugly" but I've not experienced this issue.

Ive reinstalled it now and Ive changed nothing, what I have done is listed in a different post I made earlier today, Ive put it to sleep and it is working fine. I'm half tempted to change something in sddm again and press leave to try and narrow down the issue being something to do with that over anything else

 

[FatDroid]

Usually the command will work even if the GUI doesn't. All of the GUI is basically built on top of the command line.
Many times I have been able to SSH into a system that the GUI/Desktop was hosed up. (Not always).

Very good, I shall keep that in mind for if it does it again then! Will I need to install anything whilst it is up and running to be able to get back in if I end up locked out?

 

[dos2unix]

Will I need to install anything whilst it is up and running to be able to get back in if I end up locked out?

Usually you don't have to install anything. Make sure sshd is running.

systemctl enable sshd
systemctl start sshd

Make sure the firewall isn't blocking you.

firewall-cmd --add-service=ssh --perm
firewall-cmd --reload

Just log in withthe same credentials you use in the GUI login.

 

[FatDroid]

Usually you don't have to install anything. Make sure sshd is running.

systemctl enable sshd
systemctl start sshd

Make sure the firewall isn't blocking you.

firewall-cmd --add-service=ssh --perm
firewall-cmd --reload

Just log in withthe same credentials you use in the GUI login.

Thanks man, ill get this done now