[SOLVED] Recovery help

jameswhetstone · 2018-01-20 05:06:18

Hi,

I recently ran

pacman -Syu

and during the upgrade, the system froze up and I had to do a hard reboot. Upon reboot, the output error indicated that a system file could not be found and dropped me into a emergency shell where nothing worked---even the keyboard. So I created a liveUSB with the latest Arch ISO and booted using the liveUSB. But at this point, I'm unclear on what I need to do to fix the problem. I suspect that I need to mount the existing file system and somehow re-run "pacman -Syu". Thanks in advance for the help.

---James

Last edited by jameswhetstone (2018-01-21 02:28:03)

jasonwryan · 2018-01-20 05:31:58

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pa … an_upgrade

jameswhetstone · 2018-01-20 16:25:46

Thanks for the link. I will follow the instructions there. One thing I'd like to clarify though is that the instructions don't mention anything about using chroot, and I expected it to based on my limited understanding of chroot. Is that the case, that chroot is not required in this case?

Slithery · 2018-01-20 17:27:54

You might be able to fix your system by using a chroot, but only if there isn't a problem with pacman or any of it's dependencies on the installed system.

By using pacman from the installation media with its --root and --cachedir flags you can fix the system even if pacman and its dependencies are broken.

jameswhetstone · 2018-01-20 18:04:36

Thanks for chroot explanation. I followed the instructions about upgrading the system as root, and the upgrade succeeded. There were no errors. However, I'm still getting the same error during the boot and getting dumped to an emergency shell. This is the error:

/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-udevd: error while loading shared libraries: libcryptsetup.so.12: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.

Later in the console output , there are more errors, but I think they are caused by the missing file...

ERROR : device '/dev/sda2' not found. Skipping fsck
:: mounting '/dev/sda2' on real root
mount: /new_root: no files stem type specified

Thank you,
James

jameswhetstone · 2018-01-20 18:23:23

I noticed there is another error earlier in the console oitput...

ACPI Error: Needed type [Reference], found [Integer] ffff943eec7dd678 (201170531/exresop-103)

jasonwryan · 2018-01-20 18:26:11

Ignore it.

Your issue is with the shared object (assuming your machine is encrypted) which is probably the reason that you can't boot. Note there is an assumption and a probably there, because you haven't provided any information about your setup.

jameswhetstone · 2018-01-20 18:26:54

Also, after booting with the liveUSB and mounting the the disk, I checked for the missing file and I found it at
/usr/lib/libcryptsetup.so.12

jameswhetstone · 2018-01-20 18:29:21

Thanks Jason. My disk isn't encrypted, so I'm confused about that. I'm not sure how best to describe my setup.

jasonwryan · 2018-01-20 18:32:36

Your partition table, boot{loader,manager}, relevant config files would be a start. Also read: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pe … ng#by-uuid

Scimmia · 2018-01-20 18:45:27

Sounds like a bad initramfs. Boot the install disk, mount all necessary partitions, chroot into the system, and reinstall your kernel package(s).

Last edited by Scimmia (2018-01-20 19:17:35)

jameswhetstone · 2018-01-20 18:58:25

I'll do my best...

The boot loader is EFI. There is a file called arch.conf that cintains:

title Arch Linux
linux /vmlinuz-linux
initrd /intel-ucode.img
initrd /initramfs-linux.img
options root=/dev/sda2 rw

My hardware is a macbook pro.

I have 2 partitions: one boot partition that contains the EFI boot loader and Linux images, and another that contain everything else.

/dev/sda1 is the boot partition and
/dev/sda2 is all my other files.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if I'm not describbing thing well enough.

Thank you.

jameswhetstone · 2018-01-21 00:56:04

I tried rebuilding the initramfs file many times, after checking and rechecking that my system was up to date with pacman -Syyu. What was strange is that each time I ran mkinitcpi -p linux, it always complained that it couldn't find module 'usbhid'. Based on an internet post about that, I ran 'pacman -S linux' and although it reported that it was up to date, when I ran it, it reinstalled it and rebuild the initramfs file. I then explicitly re-built the initramfs with mkinitcpio -p linux and rebooted successfully. I don't understand what caused this, nor why this solution worked, but it did.

jasonwryan · 2018-01-21 02:19:36

Please remember to mark your thread as [Solved] by editing your first post and prepending it to the title.

Arch Linux

#1 2018-01-20 05:06:18

[SOLVED] Recovery help

#2 2018-01-20 05:31:58

Re: [SOLVED] Recovery help

#3 2018-01-20 16:25:46

Re: [SOLVED] Recovery help

#4 2018-01-20 17:27:54

Re: [SOLVED] Recovery help

#5 2018-01-20 18:04:36

Re: [SOLVED] Recovery help

#6 2018-01-20 18:23:23

Re: [SOLVED] Recovery help

#7 2018-01-20 18:26:11

Re: [SOLVED] Recovery help

#8 2018-01-20 18:26:54

Re: [SOLVED] Recovery help

#9 2018-01-20 18:29:21

Re: [SOLVED] Recovery help

#10 2018-01-20 18:32:36

Re: [SOLVED] Recovery help

#11 2018-01-20 18:45:27

Re: [SOLVED] Recovery help

#12 2018-01-20 18:58:25

Re: [SOLVED] Recovery help

#13 2018-01-21 00:56:04

Re: [SOLVED] Recovery help

#14 2018-01-21 02:19:36

Re: [SOLVED] Recovery help

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