Rescuing a silverblue installation

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yesterday i had an issue that broke my silverblue setup to the extent of not being able to boot any longer to it – it was so bad that even grub didn’t show any menu no matter which key combo i tried. with regular distros what one usually does is using a live cd and then chrooting to the local setup. all my attempts at doing anything remotely similar failed, as the silverblue iso can’t find the linux setup in rescue mode.

i ended up reinstalling, which was less than ideal. what should one do in this case?

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Added atomic-desktops, system-recovery

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For live booting, you may want to use a different system. The Atomic Desktops live install media have no GUI (live desktop preview) support.

It is unclear what didnt find that.

The system is installed normally on disk. The boot stuff is separated in /boot and /boot/efi.

Depending on if you use LUKS2 or not, you either have a LUKS crypt device or your root BTRFS partition freely accessible.

If LUKS: decrypt the Partition, then proceed normally.

If not: skip

My Filesystem layout looks like this:

~ ❯❯❯ lsblk
NAME                                          MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINTS
zram0                                         252:0    0    8G  0 disk  [SWAP]
nvme0n1                                       259:0    0  1,8T  0 disk  
├─nvme0n1p1                                   259:1    0  576M  0 part  /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2                                   259:2    0 24,3G  0 part  /boot
└─nvme0n1p3                                   259:3    0  1,8T  0 part  
  └─luks-64ae1755-4591-455d-b723-1e46c31ffe53 253:0    0  1,8T  0 crypt /var/home
                                                                        /var
                                                                        /sysroot/ostree/deploy/fedora/var
                                                                        /usr
                                                                        /etc
                                                                        /
                                                                        /sysroot

Most of these are symlinks.

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having a GUI isn’t necessary, my point is the ability to chroot and execute rpm-ostree commands. opening the volume was fine (which is how i managed to get the data before reinstalling). it’s the steps afterwards that i’m very unclear about