i did update my machine with pacman -Syu. after rebooting, i cannot login. i con see this error Failed to start Virtual Console Setup a tiny second right before log in screen. i had to capture it in slow mo to able to read it. i attach the image below.
and on the login, after i enter my username and hit enter it just hangs for a while without asking the password and asks for username again. it acts like when you enter wrong password.
Fix
turns out /bin some how got messed up. thanks to @wwwgem, i looked into system logs (journalctl) and fixed it
Hmm does chroot sidestep login? Or could you mount it from the usb’s filesystem?
Chroot sidesteps login entirely. When you use chroot you’re always root and you don’t need the password of the machine you’re chrooting into.
I’ll put the link to the wiki here again ;) https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chroot
"Run arch-chroot with the new root directory as first argument:
# arch-chroot /path/to/new/rootYou can now do most of the operations available from your existing installation. Some tasks which needs D-Bus will not work as noted in #Usage"