initscripts upgrade killed my system

nicholai · 2006-05-15 01:45:25

Hi all,

Yesterday I was doing a standard pacman -Syu upgrade (stuff like glibc, udev and initscripts). While it was running in the background (in Screen) my urxvt surdenly died. I _think_ it was while it was updating the initscripts but I'm not sure. I couldn't start anything in X (ratpoison) so I did a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to exit X. Back in console I wasn't able to execute any commands since it couldn't find anything in /sbin, /usb/bin etc. Couldn't even reboot my laptop so I had to press the powerbutton.

And now the problem. When I boot I get a kernel panic: could not load init bla. bla.. I tried to specify the init in grub with

init /sbin/init

but it still couldn't find it. Funny thing is that if I tab for autocompletion in grub it lists all the files in /sbin and /usr/bin, but still refuses to load init.

I'm on a Toshiba r100 laptop
kernel: 2.6.16-beyond-6 (custom kernel)
rootfs: jfs
unstable and testing repo (to get vim-devel)

I don't have a floppy or cd drive, so I can't boot a livecd to see if the filesystem is corrupted. I _could_ set up a PXE server and do a LAN boot, but that's a hell of a lot work.

Anybody has any ideas about what is going on?

Best regards,

Nicholai

dtw · 2006-05-15 06:54:16

Could be the filesystem pkg upgrade - get a livecd and check your pacman.log

brain0 · 2006-05-15 07:39:00

This is definitely not related to initscripts. The /sbin/init binary seems to be broken which is part of sysvinit. There hasn't been a sysvinit update in some time now, so the cause must be somewhere else.

1) Without a more complete error message, we won't know what exactly hapens.
2) Try to boot with init=/bin/sh. You should get a console and can examine further.

nicholai · 2006-05-15 09:09:57

Okay, so what I have to do is to get the thing booted. I'll set up a pxe-server and let you guys know what I find out.

init=/bin/sh didn't work either. Same error,
thanks tho.

lanrat · 2006-05-15 12:28:38

Is your /etc/inittab ok ? I once had it erased while upgrading daemontools long time ago :-)

nicholai · 2006-05-15 16:58:33

I booted the system with PXE and mounted the root partition. The pacman.log didn't give me anything. Last entry was a pacman -Sy thing.

I couldn't do a chroot since it claimed /usr/bash didn't exists. So basicly I just gave up and reinstalled arch.

Thanks for the tips though.

dtw · 2006-05-15 17:40:28

Erm - you gave up way to quickly as the /usr/bash error is a minor thing

nicholai · 2006-05-15 21:37:24

Erm - you gave up way to quickly as the /usr/bash error is a minor thing

You might be right, but I need my laptop and since I couldn't execute any files on the filesystem no matter what I tried, a reinstall in 30 minuttes was to prefer. Had it been my desktop I would probably looked deeper into it.

/Nicholai

Arch Linux

#1 2006-05-15 01:45:25

initscripts upgrade killed my system

#2 2006-05-15 06:54:16

Re: initscripts upgrade killed my system

#3 2006-05-15 07:39:00

Re: initscripts upgrade killed my system

#4 2006-05-15 09:09:57

Re: initscripts upgrade killed my system

#5 2006-05-15 12:28:38

Re: initscripts upgrade killed my system

#6 2006-05-15 16:58:33

Re: initscripts upgrade killed my system

#7 2006-05-15 17:40:28

Re: initscripts upgrade killed my system

#8 2006-05-15 21:37:24

Re: initscripts upgrade killed my system

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