How to : Steam Deck Recovery Instructions, without image/external boot device, like a boss

[class101 [OLED deck]]

Hello Folks,

I wish I could post a Steam guide but unfortunately it we cant create guide

I just broke the boot of my system by adding en environment variable, causing failure in gamescope and black screen :x

And I thought it would be useful to share with you what I learned tonight to restore from my error, quick, no image download and recovery like a newbie, but revert a mistake like a pro and boot again yea

My mistake (or gamescope)

There is currently a bug in SteamOS gamescope #203[github.com], preventing the gaming mode to load the correct keyboard layout set in Desktop mode

Near the root cause of this, I have added the following lines in `/etc/environment`

XKBLAYOUT=fr
XKBVARIANT=fr
XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT=fr
XKB_DEFAULT_VARIANT=fr

After that the Deck did not boot again a single time :D

The solution

I'm sure you already all know that you can restore with boot devices with `POWER+ SOUNDUP/DOWN` and downloading recovery image as explained by the official instructions

But that's for loosers

Did you know this other method, also discussed here

POWER+ QAM (QAM is quick acces menu with three dots on the right) will display a menu allowing to load a previous system backup.

It seems when a SteamOS system updates happens, the previous system is kept and made avilable to boot.

From this system backup, you can mount the current failing system with the following command.

mkdir ~/steamos_current
sudo mount.steamos -o nohome,noboot /dev/nvme0n1 ~/steamos_current

Then I was able to revert the changes I made to ~/steamos_current/etc/environment

And after that the system booted normally again :)

[saschanaz]

Goodness I did the exact same thing and broke things, now it's back, thank you so much you are my savior

[class101 [OLED deck]]

Originally posted by saschanaz:

Goodness I did the exact same thing and broke things, now it's back, thank you so much you are my savior

It's so satisfying when you get your deck working again, you see 😀

You are welcome ❤️