The goal was to upgrade Mint Cinnamon 18.3 to 19.3. But as I reported before, the install would hang. Googled and tried many suggestions, which meant multiple boot attempts with various boot overrides (for example nomodeset), but nothing would work. Actually abandoned an early attempt to double check locations because I didn’t want to overwrite anything. Used gparted on old Mint which seemed to hang scanning /dev/sdc. Looking at the monitor it didn’t really seem to be doing anything no CPU or disk I/O to speak of. But after about 15min it finally completed the scan. So that made me think perhaps the Install was doing something similar. So I reattempted the install and set a timer for 15min, all the while it really didn’t appear to be doing anything.
But sure enough the install finally proceeded after ~15min and I was able to complete the install. But I couldn’t logon to Mint afterward. I would enter my password and it would just pop back to the signon screen! Looked familiar and my first thought was a wrong pointer to Mints /home. OK I’ll research on Manjaro. Except selecting Manjaro from grub resulted in a Kernel Panic and hang. This also looked familiar. I think a past Mint install didn’t set up Manjaro properly in grub, So now neither distro works!
So I’ll reluctantly reinstall Manjaro. Manjaro has updated so many times since the original install that I decided to download the current Manjaro rather than use the old ISO…so I did that using the install media. I felt confident in a Manjaro reinstall. Sure enough I could logon to Manjaro after the install. Afterwards Manjaro needed to update 431 packages. I only wanted to update Firefox because it didn’t like the newer Firefox config files, and Keepass. I foolishly tried to use the pamac GUI that sits in the trey. So I searched for Keepass and selected it, at that point only 2 other packages were on the screen. I clicked apply not realizing that it was also going to try and apply the other 431 updates. I say foolishly, but it really was logical and my misunderstanding. Afterwards Manjaro did a better job setting up Mint in grub than Mint did setting up Manjaro. However I still couldn’t signon to Mint. So I altered grub to start Mint in single user mode. In that mode it appears by doing a directory that /home was empty. And the mount command doesn’t show Mints home device…/dev/sdb5. So I need to continue with this tomorrow. Probably start by looking at the log files. What fun!