Do my installed distro and live distro have to match when doing repairs? (eg. bootloader)

Can I use an LMDE-Mint live USB to repair my installed Garuda distro?

I broke my Garuda install after updating, and after restoring a snapshot it still won’t boot, which, as I understand, is a result of the snapshot using a previous version of the bootloader. I want to use a live USB to chroot and reinstall my bootloader, but my live Garuda is long gone and all I have lying around is LMDE Mint.

Is this still possible, even though they are based on different distros, or do I have to recreate a Garuda USB stick?

Asked By: Sea Citadel

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The short answer is yes.

Here is what you need to do :

  1. Boot any live Linux distro that will have the necessary software to access your harddisk. for example not all have raid or lvm included but lmdm does so you’re good to go.

  2. When in the live distro you mount your old OS to a repair folder ex. /mnt/repair.

  3. Loop mount all necessary folders /proc /dev /sys etc.

  4. Chroot into /mnt/repair.

  5. At this point you’re basically inside your old OS you can install new packages and restore/install your bootloader as normal.

  6. update-grub, install-grub /dev/sdX.

Check out this tutorial.

Answered By: Vincent Stans