Booting Quartz64 Model B

[CounterPillow]

swapping to a different / new SD card got me all the way to a shell! then i installed a few packages and rebooted and now the file system seems to be corrupted again

Alright, it's best then to try a different image like Manjaro for the Model B for now, I'll try to see if I can reproduce this with a fast SD card. The only case I've seen where a file system corrupts after one reboot like these is when someone made their ext4 partition overlap the u-boot partition, but I doubt you've done this.

Sorry for all the trouble getting started with this, hopefully we can get more images and more testing done to make sure issues like the ones you're running into are ironed out.