Arch Linux

Danio

Member

Registered: 2010-10-08

Posts: 4

Remote install: frozen chroot/grub-install

Hello everyone,

I am attempting to install Arch Linux on a dedicated server I am renting from hetzner.de, using their rescue operating system based on Debian 5.0.
I'm primarily using the following two wikis:
- http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Rem … ux_Install (which however might be a bit outdated, last updated in 2008)
- http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ins … ting_Linux
And various other specific wiki pages.

I have the following partitioning scheme:

/dev/sda1 /boot
/dev/sda5 & /dev/sdb5 as swap in software RAID-0 using mdadm and LVM
/dev/sda6 & /dev/sdb6 as root in software RAID-0 using mdadm and LVM

I mounted the root in the rescue system and put a folder in to for pacman and one for the Arch filesystem (which I would then move up one folder).
I got to where I had to install grub so I executed grub-install /dev/sda in the chrooted Arch environment, but I had forgotten to move up the filesystem one folder (so I still had the system in newarch/).
It said installing grub, but it didn't do anything else. I left the it on overnight and today it was still showing the same. I tried stopping it by pressing CTRL+C, but that only showed ^C, so I closed the screen window.
I wanted to move to filesystem up a folder and then try again, but it wouldn't let me unmount /boot because it was busy. So I see in ps that grub-install is still running, but I can't seem to kill it with the kill command.
If I chroot in again, and try to install something with pacman it "freezes" up as well, not letting me stop pacman, again showing ^C's in the terminal.

root@rescue /mnt/root/newarch # chroot . /bin/bash
[root@rescue /]# pacman -S screen
^C

root@rescue ~ # ps -e | grep grub
27008 ?        00:00:00 install-grub

root@rescue ~ # ps -e | grep pacman
14939 pts/3    00:00:00 pacman

Could anyone help me with some advice? I don't want to reboot the machine as I'm sure it will most definitely not boot back up properly again.
Thanks in advance.

Last edited by Danio (2010-10-08 15:10:09)

Danio

Member

Registered: 2010-10-08

Posts: 4

Re: Remote install: frozen chroot/grub-install

I have found that my LVM volume now is not responding anymore at all. Trying to force unmount it doesn't work. Trying to kill the two bash processes that are using it with kill -9 doesn't work either.

root@rescue ~ # fuser -m /dev/md1array/root
/dev/md1array/root:  14939rce 23287c 25009re 27008re
root@rescue ~ # ps -e | grep 14939
14939 ?        00:00:00 pacman
root@rescue ~ # ps -e | grep 23287
23287 pts/5    00:00:00 bash
root@rescue ~ # kill -9 23287
root@rescue ~ # ps -e | grep 23287
23287 pts/5    00:00:00 bash

Last edited by Danio (2010-10-09 11:08:27)