(Yes I stole this awesome title.)

So!! You'll never guess what happened a few days ago. The SSD on my main computer started corrupting! It started with one of my partitions suddenly becoming read-only. When I popped up some utilities to check on my disk, they said my partition had an "invalid superblock" and "bad magic number."

Naturally, I panicked. Pretty much immediately, I stopped using my main OS for fear of further damage to my stuff, then ordered a new SSD (NVMe!) on Amazon. The wait, spent chilling to youtube on a garuda linux live usb and checking for the package every fifteen minutes, was agonizing. Finally, it got here, I put it in, and with the help of an awesome new friend who offered their help, I started copying my old SSD over to the new one.

That's when I noticed: There were errors. Specifically, read-write errors. When I copied my windows partition, there were only 24... sounds pretty standard for windows, honestly. But when I copied my windows-linux shared partition... well, there were thousands. TENS of thousands. I flat out couldn't do a disk copy through dd. I had no choice but to copy files manually. Thankfully, that went well.

But the real problem was when I tried to add back my Linux partition.

At first I just copied it over through dd like the rest. GRUB showed up fine the next boot. But when I picked linux... it would hang. That's odd, I thought. I spent several more hours copying it over. Maybe there was a hiccup during the copy? Nooope. I changed the launch options so I could see the specifics. It was freezing when initializing nvidia dms.

So, was it an nvidia driver problem?

I booted back to the live USB and attempted to chroot into the copied partition. I thought, I've done this plenty of times, this'll be easy. What I didn't realize is Garuda Linux has its own chroot tool called garuda-chroot which you're supposed to use instead. So I spent several hours trying to reinstall the nvidia drivers without the chroot, which only caused even more problems and desperately restarting the disk copy.

After several frustrating hours, I gave up and decided to do a fresh install and copy my files over. I reinstalled Garuda Linux, ran the initial updater, aaand the OS is borked. What?

I kind of knew I would run into this. Several months ago, the maintainers of the AUR merged KDE Plasma 6 into the upstream. It broke mine and a friend's installs, so we reverted and never updated. We've been having issues with it ever since. And when I was trying to reinstall linux, I was all but forced to get it every time!

I spent even more hours trying to devise a way to reinstall garuda linux without upgrading to plasma 6. Hours and hours of frustration, of pacman hacks, of ignorepkg configurations, of trials and retrials. All for nothing. As far as I'm concerned, it's impossible unless you're already on an arch install with KDE 5.

At this point my mind began to wander to near philosophical levels. Are all forms of data storage doomed to run out eventually? They're just funny electricity diodes and capacitors. Is no digital media permanent? Is every form of storage - USB, SSD, HDD, and others - doomed to corrode away eventually? Why can't data be forever?

I gave up and tried to live with Plasma 6. But the sheer weight of trying to move my stuff, my profiles, my themes, my programs, over to the new Garuda on plasma 6... broke me. I wanted to cry. I desperately began asking a friend for recommendations of OSes to jump ship to.

In a last ditch attempt, I went back to trying the disk-copy method. Having learned of garuda-chroot by this point, I tried that too. I had come close the previous night, only to have it slip away at the last minute. Problems with initramfs. But it gave me hope. Maybe the disk-copy method IS doable. I just need to do it right.

And lo and behold, buried away in garuda linux's corner of the internet, I found the answer.

dracut

All I had to do. Was copy the partition with dd. Use garuda-chroot to enter it. And type

sudo dracut-rebuild

And just like that, I booted back to my Linux partition with no more incidents.

Everything was fixed.

Closing thoughts

Garuda linux was very good to me right up until plasma 6 was pushed out several months ago. Truth be told, maybe rolling release distros aren't for me. Maybe I just want to stay sitting comfy with what I have. I learned that through this.

I also learned that Garuda Linux's customizations can be a bit of a handful if you don't know them off the top of your head. Honestly, having to stumble upon a random blog post talking about the move to dracut was not fun. I wouldn't have gotten out of this mess otherwise.

I'm considering hopping to a distro that isn't arch-based, one I can sit on long-term. Something that also runs plasma 5, so I can keep my comfy setup. My only concern is I've become very reliant on the AUR to get programs. I don't know if other OSes will let me get everything.