i did update my machine with pacman -Syu. after rebooting, i cannot login. i con see this error Failed to start Virtual Console Setup a tiny second right before log in screen. i had to capture it in slow mo to able to read it. i attach the image below.
and on the login, after i enter my username and hit enter it just hangs for a while without asking the password and asks for username again. it acts like when you enter wrong password.
Fix
turns out /bin some how got messed up. thanks to @wwwgem, i looked into system logs (journalctl) and fixed it
Well there’s your problem.
Login gets called to check if the username you put in is in the list of users and if it is it asks for a password (behavior subject to configuration). If you don’t have /bin/login you can’t login!
Advice to fix arch is as follows: boot from usb, chroot to your environment and use the built in tools to fix it automatically.
yeah thats exactly what i did. fixed it. sorry for late reply
No apology necessary, did you figure out what caused it or weather some binaries were missing or just had screwy permissions?
E: just saw your update. Nice job!
Hmm does chroot sidestep login? Or could you mount it from the usb's filesystem?
I'll put the link to the wiki here again ;) https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chroot
"Run arch-chroot with the new root directory as first argument:
You can now do most of the operations available from your existing installation. Some tasks which needs D-Bus will not work as noted in #Usage"
Chroot sidesteps login entirely. When you use chroot you're always root and you don't need the password of the machine you're chrooting into.