Arch Linux

dbc

Member

Registered: 2009-07-20

Posts: 10

Totally hosed an upgrade, can I recover?

So... starting with an Arch system that had not been updated in quite a while, I did a pacman -Syu (hey, why not?)  and took a long list of upgrades.  After dealing with the surprisingly minimal conf file skew, I tried to reboot.  But... it seems that I had a h0rk3d HOOKS list in mkinitrd.conf during the upgrade, so the kernel upgrade didn't go so well. In fact, there are no bootable images in my /boot partition.

I can boot off a CD and mount the old partitions, no problem.  I'm thinking there is probably some way to boot off of CD, mount the old / and /boot partitions, and chroot over there to patch things up.... presumably by running mkinitrd again or maybe just forcing pacman to run the kernel upgrade again.  Of course, I need to make sure mkinitrd gets pointed at the kernel on the hard disk and not the CD.  Is this reasonable? And if so, can somebody point me at some instructions?  Otherwise, I'm looking at a full re-install -- luckily I won't lose anything but it sure will be tedious.

TIA
-dave

.:B:.

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2006-11-26

Posts: 5,819

Website

Re: Totally hosed an upgrade, can I recover?

You need to mess up pretty badly not to be able to recover your setup. Boot from the installation CD and chroot into your existing installation. You can fix things from there.

There are quite a few rescue topics around like that, you should search the forum for more detailed instructions.

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dbc

Member

Registered: 2009-07-20

Posts: 10

Re: Totally hosed an upgrade, can I recover?

Recovered!

For those who in the future may attempt a kernel upgrade with a bad /etc/mkinitcpio.conf:

Booted LiveCD.
Followed http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Change_Root
setting all the appropriate mounts (I have a bunch of disks on this machine...)
setting up a chroot'ed environment.
Repaired /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
Re-ran the /sbin/mkinitcpio commands copied from /var/log/pacman.log
which happily replaced my /boot/*.img files with sensible things instead of the bit-scribbles left by the upgrade.

-dave