Hi Ludo, Hi Bryan, On Mon, 21 Jan 2019 10:50:41 +0100 Ludovic Courtès wrote: > It’s not surprising to .lock files to be empty. I agree. But I didn't filter them out because it would be confusing. > But where are those > files you’re talking about? Surely there’s no /gnu/store on the VFAT > EFI partition, right? Oh, these empty files are on the root partition Bryan provided - there are lots and lots of empty files, including very important ones like the pam configuration files and the elogind configuration files (which is why the login didn't work). It looks like something crashed or sync(2) wasn't called before reboot or something. Some flash storage devices like to lie about whether they synced something (they'll say they did sync but they really didn't yet). If one then cuts the power it leads to data loss. But that's all speculation. @Bryan: Would you be up to doing the installation again but then before the reboot do a manual invocation of "sync" and then wait 5 min before rebooting? Is it flash storage? I didn't check the contents of the ESP partition because they don't matter. What matters is whether the ESP partition is dirty (it was) and whether a manual invocation of "fsck.vfat" succeeds on it (it does). Out of curiousity I checked ESP anyway now. It has: EFI EFI/GuixSD EFI/GuixSD/grubx64.efi $ ls -l EFI/GuixSD/grubx64.efi -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 155136 11. Jan 16:52 /mnt/tmp/EFI/GuixSD/grubx64.efi That's all there is in the ESP partition.