Tumbleweed System Broken

My Suse Tumbleweed is broken.
I had not run it in a while and when I did, it wanted to do updates, over 3 GB of downloads, so I let it. But it got stuck on 74% and after I waited for 4 hours, it was still stuck. Then I saw it was frozen. No response to anything. Would not shut down or respond to any command, nor control-alt-del or a 1 second push of the power button. I had to shut off the power. I booted from a sysrec usb stick and ran e2fsck. The output is included below. Now when I try to boot Tumbleweed it does not work. I get the login screen, select my user and enter the password, and then the system is frozen again. Not as bad as the first time: I can get it to shut down with a 1 second push of the power button. I can also boot the tumbleweed system in recovery mode, in command line as root - but I don’t know what to do there. Any suggestions on how I might recover the system?

I have tried e2fsck with -vpf and vpfcc - the output looks like this:

e2fsck -vpf -C 0 /dev/sda2
Inode 655934 extent tree (at level 1) could be shorter. IGNORED.
Inode 8267686 extent tree (at level 1) could be shorter. IGNORED.
1104731 inodes used (6.74%, out of 16384000)
1861 non-contiguous files (0.2%)
1366 non-contiguous directories (0.1%)
# of inodes with ind/dind/tind blocks: 0/0/0
Extent depth histogram: 818757/404
16912584 blocks used (25.81%, out of 65536000)
0 bad blocks
3 large files
713085 regular files
81548 directories
0 character device files
0 block device files
4 fifos
145902 links
310024 symbolic links (285498 fast symbolic links)
60 sockets

 1250623 files

I updated a Tumbleweed system yesterday, that had not been used for 6 months.

At several points during the update, it reported an error. It gave me a choice of retry,ignore,abort. I went with ignore. This seemed to happen about 20 times during the update.

After the update, I rebooted. And I then ran “zypper dup” again. This time it update 20 packages – presumably the ones that had failed on the first run. And all seems okay.

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What I usually do is run zypper dup -d until all packages download (I’ve just gotten in the habit of doing a pre-download before running zypper dup to apply the updates.

That way if there are issues with the download, I can do a zypper ref && zypper dup -d in case I’ve caught something mid-sync on the mirrors.

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You can get into failsafe mode. You can also update from the console in text mode with "sudo zypper dup "

Are you able to boot from a read-only snapshot?

Apparently zypper will not work in the rescue mode command line. It produces more than a screen of error messages. I think that it is not finding any repositories or may not be on-line, but I can’t handle all that technical stuff. Android mentioned booting from a snapshot: how would one do that? Apparently I have a snapshot directory with what appears to be a copy of the system. But I don’t know if it is possible to boot from a directory.

What would happen if I just mounted the drive and copied the actual files
to overwrite / ?

How to get internet connection in command line:

Don’t copy files to recover.

Recovery using snapshots is done from the grub menu - System recovery and snapshot management with Snapper | Reference | openSUSE Leap 15.6 is written for Leap, but is the same for Tumbleweed.

I tried
zypper dup -y
and it worked.
The system is running again. Thanks.
I did not know you could hit F10 to boot the command line.
They might put that on the screen.

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