Arch Linux

duke11235

Member

Registered: 2009-10-09

Posts: 221

Boot Failure at UDEV Load

My arch linux install ran fine yesterday, but I updated and restarted, and now it crashes on the udev step in the boot process. I'd love to give you guys more info, but I'm not sure how to image the logs or what you would require. Just let me know. If all else fails I could reinstall, but I don't really want to.

Thanks

uka

Member

Registered: 2011-10-25

Posts: 19

Re: Boot Failure at UDEV Load

Hello all, had the same issue, fixed it by rolling back.

In my case, I compile my own kernels just for fun, this means I don't use mkinitcpio as I have a tailor made kernel for my machine.

As duke11235 says, the boot up process stops at "Loading udev... something something...  [FAIL]".

With that kind of failure at such an initial event, not even the /dev/sd? entries are created.

I then entered the maintenance mode and remounted the /dev/root partition in read/write mode (mount -o rw,remount /) and proceeded to mess things up.

I checked out at /var/log/pacman.log what where the changes and found out these new packages installed yesterday:

[2011-10-24 19:54] Running 'pacman -Syu'
[2011-10-24 19:54] synchronizing package lists
[2011-10-24 19:55] starting full system upgrade
[2011-10-24 19:56] upgraded freetype2 (2.4.6-1 -> 2.4.7-1)
[2011-10-24 19:56] upgraded git (1.7.7-1 -> 1.7.7.1-1)
[2011-10-24 19:56] upgraded kbd (1.15.3-1 -> 1.15.3-2)
[2011-10-24 19:56] upgraded mkinitcpio-busybox (1.18.5-1 -> 1.19.2-1)
[2011-10-24 19:56] ATTENTION UDEV:
[2011-10-24 19:56] ----------
[2011-10-24 19:56] We now use upstream rules for assigning devices to the 'disk', 'optical',
[2011-10-24 19:56] 'scanner' and 'video' groups. Beware of any changes.
[2011-10-24 19:56]   --
[2011-10-24 19:56] We no longer create symlinks from /dev/<dev> to /dev/<dev>0.
[2011-10-24 19:56]   --
[2011-10-24 19:56] For security reasons, we no longer add devices to the 'storage' group. Use
[2011-10-24 19:56] udisks and friends, or add custom rules to /etc/udev.d/rules/, if you want
[2011-10-24 19:56] this functionality back.
[2011-10-24 19:56]  --
[2011-10-24 19:56] We no longer create the static nodes on install needed for an initrd-less and
[2011-10-24 19:56] devtmpfs-less boot, this only affects fresh installs.
[2011-10-24 19:56] ---------------
[2011-10-24 19:56] upgraded udev (173-3 -> 174-1)
[2011-10-24 19:56] upgraded mkinitcpio (0.7.4-1 -> 0.7.5-1)
[2011-10-24 19:56] upgraded xorg-server-common (1.11.1-2 -> 1.11.1.901-1)
[2011-10-24 19:56] upgraded xorg-server (1.11.1-2 -> 1.11.1.901-1)
[2011-10-24 19:56] upgraded xorg-sessreg (1.0.6-2 -> 1.0.7-1)
[2011-10-24 19:56] upgraded xorg-xdpyinfo (1.2.0-2 -> 1.3.0-1)

Hmm, udev is messed up. So, I downgraded it to 173-3. Which fortunately I haven't deleted yet.

pacman -U  /var/cache/pacman/pkg/udev-173-3-i686.pkg.tar.xz

It has dependencies on mkinitcpio which in turn requires kernel26, so I just removed those (Which fortunately I didn't needed) and downgraded.

Now I have my system back.

It is very dangerous to do that kind of upgrade without nothing more than just a warning. At the moment there are two unfortunate users, but maybe many more will come scratching their heads at why the boot process can't find /dev/sda1!! What, the disks are gone?

Well, after all this isn't the first, nor the last hair pulling situation Arch has put me in. But, I would like to ask the maintainers to be more cautious when dealing with this, not everybody can recover from a boot failure. My circumstances are clearly an exception (Custom kernel), and it allowed me to quickly overturn the situation.

Now I need to read what this thing of 'udisks' is... I remember the old days when Linux was more simple and straightforward...Nowadays everything is so 'dynamic', and xorg uses funny XML files to set up thing..  Ah, those were the days...

And I'm not even 30 yet!

duke11235

Member

Registered: 2009-10-09

Posts: 221

Re: Boot Failure at UDEV Load

That sounds like a plausible explanation I'll have to look into. But my udev does not say fail exactly, it merely outputs some text to do with drivers and stops doing anything else. If what you say is the problem, how would I fix it. I have arch on lvm partitions. Are you saying it would be solved by simply installing udisks? Also, how do you enter maintenance mode?