"Installation Failed" "Package Manager error"

Issues & Assistance
1

Hi everyone!
I’ve been dying to try out CachyOS as I’ve heard so many great things about it. However, during the installation process, I ran into a couple problems, one of which I’m really stuck on.

Specifically, I’m consistently getting an error partway during the installation, stating “Installation Failed” “Package Manager error”. The Details come out as: “The package manager could not make changes to the installed system. The command 

pacman
returned error code 1.”

The automatically generated log can be found here: https://termbin.com/lkxo

Some other noteworthy information: I got a “fatal library error” that seemed to be connected to snap-pac, so I tried excluding it from the installation, which didn’t help.
Also, I wanted to install CachyOS on a machine that already has another OS on another drive, but that seemed to lead to problems during the installation as well because there were encrypted partitions on there, so I disconnected every single drive except the one I’m trying to install on (which is empty), which solved the problem. I had also hoped, it would provide as clean of an install as possible.

I have an Asus motherboard, an AMD Ryzen CPU and an NVIDIA GPU (pretty standard stuff, I’m assuming) and am trying to install unto a 4TB Samsung SSD.

I’ve also researched the issue and have come up with different solutions, which usually boil down to “use the CLI tool”, which I’m afraid I’m not knowledgeable enough for, or “the mirrors are not yet synced” which, obviously, I couldn’t fix on my own anyway, but it… might go unnoticed for long unless someone posts about it…? Not sure.

Anyway, I’d be very grateful if someone has some suggestions for me to try!

Thanks in advance!

2

I’m guessing it’s one of these (idk a fix)

2026-02-19 - 01:48:26 [6]: [PYTHON JOB]: "pacstrap: installing gnupg..." 
2026-02-19 - 01:48:26 [6]: [PYTHON JOB]: "pacstrap: error: command failed to execute correctly" 
...
2026-02-19 - 01:48:41 [6]: [PYTHON JOB]: "pacstrap: (21/25) Updating GRUB Config" 
2026-02-19 - 01:48:41 [6]: [PYTHON JOB]: "pacstrap: /usr/bin/grub-mkconfig: line 271: /boot/grub/grub.cfg.new: No such file or directory" 
2026-02-19 - 01:48:41 [6]: [PYTHON JOB]: "pacstrap: error: command failed to execute correctly"
3

I had your first issue in the past, and from my experience the issue is related to the selected desktop environment. From my own experience, selecting Budgie (and maybe Cinnamon too, although I haven’t seen it first hand with that) will result in that error. From what I read while troubleshooting, it’s something to do with the installer calling for a package is no longer used, resulting in that error.

The solution that worked for me is to simply install a different DE, but there might be some other way.

4

Thank you for the suggestion - Budgie was indeed the problem! Installing just Cinnamon worked fine, though it leaves me wondering, why Budgie is offered if it results in an error… Either way, thank you very much for your help!

5

Selecting Niri leads to the same error too.

6

The main error is:

failed retrieving file ‘gcc-15.2.1…’ from cdn77.cachyos.org: 404
failed retrieving file ‘glibc-2.43…’: 404

sudo nano /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Comment out the cdn77 line:

#Server = https://cdn77.cachyos.org/$repo/$arch

Then add another official mirror at the top, for example:

Server = https://mirror.cachyos.org/repo/$repo/$arch