I was doing a remote system software upgrade and the machine became unresponsive. Now it boots directly into the BIOS.
Years ago, I'd have a sinking feeling of disaster. Now, I'm merely exhaustingly ...
Less than an hour. It boiled down to booting from an Arch live USB stick, then:
```
$ sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt
$ sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/efi
$ sudo arch-chroot /mnt
$ pacman -Syu
$ dracut -f
$ exit
$ sudo shutdown -r now
```
Most of the time was figuring out which boot loader generator I was using on that machine (dracut), and double-checking the dracut config, and making sure I was mounting the boot partition in the right place. Mounting the boot partition at /efi` instead of somewhere in `/boot` just seems wrong, but that's a quarter century of grub conditioning talking; and it's likely what caused the issue this time: me doing something with dracut but mounting the boot partition in the wrong place.
```
$ sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt
$ sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/efi
$ sudo arch-chroot /mnt
$ pacman -Syu
$ dracut -f
$ exit
$ sudo shutdown -r now
```
Most of the time was figuring out which boot loader generator I was using on that machine (dracut), and double-checking the dracut config, and making sure I was mounting the boot partition in the right place. Mounting the boot partition at /efi` instead of somewhere in `/boot` just seems wrong, but that's a quarter century of grub conditioning talking; and it's likely what caused the issue this time: me doing something with dracut but mounting the boot partition in the wrong place.