Arch Linux

Tempest

Member

Registered: 2011-08-01

Posts: 22

[Workaround] Boot Failure After Update

So, I use Arch on my home server, and although I keep it relatively up-to-date, I don't restart it often (I probably get around to rebooting it every 3 or so kernel updates, to actually apply the updates).  I updated it this afternoon and then tried restarting it, but it won't successfully boot.

Just some background:  It has several (7 at the moment, usually 8) SATA drives in it that are part of a big mdadm array.  This array doesn't contain any part of the OS (no programs, just "plain old files"), so it should be irrelevant.  It also has an 80 GB IDE drive, partitioned like this:

sda1 is a 250 MB boot partition, ext2.
sda2 is a 15 GB root partition, ext4, encrypted with LUKS.
sda3 is a 10 GB swap partition (it is not yet encrypted with LUKS - but will be when I get around to it, after issues like this).

The bootloader seems to work fine, but then it fails to load /dev/sda2.  Normally it asks for a password from my keyboard to load the root partition, but it never gets to this.  After dropping to an emergency shell, I can see all of the 7 other SATA drives, but not the IDE OS drive.

My mkinitcpio.conf file is pretty standard.  The MODULES array contains "ext4", and the HOOKS array contains "base udev autodetect usb usbinput keymap ide pata scsi sata encrypt filesystems" (it used to not have "ide" - that's just my attempt at getting something working, and I intend to remove it).

Any help would be greatly appreciated - I'm not sure how to begin troubleshooting this, really.

Last edited by Tempest (2012-03-31 13:49:18)

Gcool

Member

Registered: 2011-08-16

Posts: 1,456

Re: [Workaround] Boot Failure After Update

Perhaps a similar issue as discussed here? There's also a workaround listed in that thread.

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Burninate!

niqingliang2003

Member

Registered: 2010-06-23

Posts: 25

Re: [Workaround] Boot Failure After Update

maybe it is related with the newest kernel, 3.2.12/3.2.13/3.3
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/29063

Tempest

Member

Registered: 2011-08-01

Posts: 22

Re: [Workaround] Boot Failure After Update

I can confirm that adding pcie_aspm=force to the kernel line in grub's menu.lst is a good workaround for this.  I guess I'll take it out every so often to see if it gets fixed.

Thanks for the pointers!