Hello Community,

I have been following the Arch Wiki Beginner's Guide and I can't seem to get arch-chroot working for me. This is the third time running through the entire process. The first time I ran through the process I got stuck in Grub2 at the end. More specifically I got stuck at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...27_Guide#Extra, I'm not sure if a login screen should have appeared, but at the very least it wasn't a normal terminal prompt.

Now I can't even go through the arch-chroot step. Here's the error:

#arch-chroot /mnt
mount: sys is already mounted or /mnt/sys busy
sys is already mounted on /sys
sys is already mounted on /mnt/sys
==> ERROR: failed to setup API filesystems in chroot /mnt

I don't understand this message, since I thought every time I rebooted the filesystems should have automatically unmounted, and therefore I would've had to remount them every time I reran the live cd. I tried to unmount the filesystems, boot and home were mounted on /mnt/boot and /mnt/home, they unmounted fine. I couldn't unmount root which was mounted on /mnt, ( I tried umount /mnt with no avail)

Does someone know what is happening? I've installed Arch before, but they changed the process this time and I don't know what is supposed to happen at the end.

So in Summary:
1) How do I fix the above problem with arch-chroot?
2) What is 'sys' supposed to be and how did it get mounted in the first place? I never typed any command mounting it.
3) After the process of going through the instructions, am I supposed to get stuck in Grub2 after rebooting? (it may make sense since I don't have any gui set up, but I should be able to login to my user account right?)
4) If none of these problems sound familiar, is the issue something to do with my live cd? Do I need to make another one?

Any help is appreciated.

Hi,

I'm not very familiar with Arch (tried it some years ago, but never tried it again), so I'm not sure how the liveCD works and why is it mounting the installed system automatically (if it's doing so). You could check what is actually mounted with the mount command (should tell you which partitions are mounted and where). Not sure, but maybe the arch-chroot command is using mount points reserved for the liveCD? This would explain the error you're having. Anyway, what I'd do is to check what is mounted --and where-- with the mount command (without using the arch-chroot command), and in case the installed system is not mounted, you could mount and chroot it manually and finish the installation from there: how to chroot manually.

And yes, you should be able to login to your user account from a CLI environment provided you have created one and you have successfully installed grub to the MBR.

Good luck!

After a second read, I see you're invoking arch-chroot on /mnt, and judging from this it seems it must be run on /mnt/arch. Maybe that's what's causing problems?

I read that page just before your post, I think I'm doing the command the correct way since I mounted my root partition in /mnt. I read that part as simply invoke the arch-chroot in the same place as where you mounted root. Also, I ran the original command because the instructions told me to do so.

Another thing that was interesting from this article, is that it says that arch-chroot replaces the 4 mount commands. One of them uses "sys", and remember my error command had something like "sys was already mounted"? Could it be that I need to unmount sys to use arch-chroot?

So I tried the following and got the error message:

#umount /mnt/sys
umount: /mnt/sys: target is busy.
(In some cases useful info about processes that use
the device is found by lsof(8) or fuser(1))

Now I'm trying to see what lsof and fuser have to do with this, will report back soon.