System D-Bus fails to start after an update failing midway

Basically, the laptop shut down midway during an update. When booting back up, there was no option to boot into Arch. Only one option was to boot to UEFI Settings.

First guess: Regenerate initramfs and it should work

• Booted into Live ISO
• Connected to wifi from ISO (which was surprisingly simple, I've only connected through ethernet in ISO till this point)
• Mounted the disks
• Did mount --bind /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/etc/resolv.conf for wifi to work.
• Arch-chrooted into the disk.
• Ran pacman -Syu linux instead of mkinitcpio -p linux.

🎊 Successfully boots 💩 dbus completely fails - does not even start.

Things I've realized/think is true:

• if dbus doesn't work, then there is no way X11 or Wayland would start with a desktop.
• for some reason, even poweroff and systemctl restart failed.
• systemctl does not respond

After searching around, found this post Failed to start D-Bus System Message Bus after update crashed

• Do all steps as before in Live ISO.
• sudo LC_ALL=C pacman -Qkk | grep -v ', 0 altered files' > packages.status
• Saw that there were lot of packages with no mtree.
• Did some vim f-ery to get only those packages with no mtree into packages_reinstall.txt
• sudo pacman -S $(< packages_reinstall.txt) --dbonly
• sudo pacman -S $(< packages_reinstall.txt)
• sudo pacman -Syu I'm not sure which one of these pacman commands are actually needed, but I did it in this order.

Reboot and it works