I've been bitten by this once before, and a user on #guix did as well. When there are problems in the root filesystem that fsck doesn't want to fix automatically, the user is dumped into a guile prompt where PATH is not set, and it's very inconvenient to run fsck manually.
This is what I just suggested that the user type, with apologies: (use-modules (ice-9 ftw) (srfi srfi-26)) (define dirs (scandir "/gnu/store" (cut string-suffix? "e2fsprogs-1.42.13" <>))) (define e2fsck (string-append "/gnu/store/" (car dirs) "/sbin/e2fsck")) (system* e2fsck "/dev/XXX") Is there a better way? Speaking from personal experience, it's very painful to do anything non-trivial in that REPL. Even just adding readline would help a lot. Maybe we should at least set PATH to include the available /bin and /sbin directories before entering the REPL. We should probably also handle errors from fsck specially. Thoughts? Mark