Erased boot partition, how to regenerate it?

Issues & Assistance
1

While trying to remove my broken Windows installation, KDE Partition Manager erased my /boot partition. The system is still running. How do I regenerate the boot partition so that my system will still work once I reboot? I use systemd-boot as the bootloader.

I already tried sudo mkinitcpio -p linux-cachyos in the hope it would put the kernel image back but that just complains about the files not existing anymore.

2

Well assuming you have recreated your ESP partition…if it was destroyed, try ‘bootctl install’.

3

Create the partition again, run “bootctl install” and then “sudo sdboot-manage gen”

4

I had to mount the new partition at /mnt/boot as it doesn’t seem to pick it up without a reboot. After setting SYSTEMD_RELAX_ESP_CHECKS to 1 I was able to run bootctl install --esp-path=/mnt/boot.

However sdboot-manage gen --esp-path=/mnt/boot gives the error “There are no boot loader entries after entry generation”, probably because there is no kernel image file.

5

Since the new partition wasn’t even recognized, I chrooted into the system from a live USB and did it again. I used cp /usr/lib/modules/6.10.6-3-cachyos/vmlinuz /boot/vmlinuz-linux to put the kernel image back so that the boot loader entry can be generated.

However now it says “Error preparing initrd: Not found” in red flashing letters when turning the computer on.

6

THis is not how it works. You just need to reinstall the kernel, to generate these freshly.
Also, it would be not the “vmlinuz-linux”, it would be “vmlinuz-linux-cachyos”

Just run in the chroot, if properly mounted:
sudo pacman -Sy linux-cachyos linux-cachyos-headers

This will put this into the correcte directorys and regenerate the initramfs with mkinitcpio.

7

linux-cachyos-headers did it, thanks! Regenerating the bootloader entries from within a chroot messed up the ld.luks.name option in the entry but after changing it back to what it said in /etc/fstab my system works again!

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