Arch Linux

wiloma

Member

Registered: 2023-01-04

Posts: 3

[solved] Update to 6.1.2, no network, no external drives, no touchpad

I think this is newbie enough for here.

After running pacman -Syu and updating things to 6.1.2-arch1-1, a bunch of things are broken.

I have no network. lspci -v tells me that the network controller exists, but the kernel driver does not seem to have loaded (is not "in use). Running dmesg | grep firmware confirms this. In fact, grep for the ath9k driver returns nothing. I get no wlan0 network interface; nothing appears.

Complication: uname -r and pacman -Qs tell me 6.1.1 is running, though 6.1.2 exists on the machine. When I search for the network module with modprobe, it returns "FATAL: module ath9k not found in directory /lib/modules/6.1.1-arch1-1", probably because the directory does not exist; only /lib/modules/6.1.2-arch1-1 exists.

Similarly, the CYAPA touchpad does not work. No kernel driver is loaded.

When I insert a USB flash card or thumb drive, the drives do not mount. lsblk reports that they are not visible as /dev.

I reinstalled 6.1.2 from a thumb drive, edition 2023-01-01, removing all things on my main partition except my /home directory. Boot partition and swap were untouched. But I get the same results, and I still get uname -r reporting 6.1.1 running, even after reinstallation.

I get the same results whether under the brand new root user or the old /home user.

Going through https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Networ … d_firmware suggests me to install the ath9k driver, but I see no easy way to do this as it's part of "backports" and I have no internet connection. Similarly it's difficult to post lspci and dmesg and uname and other terminal commands as I have no internet and no way to transfer to an external drive to get it to another computer.

I *can* boot from the external Arch media and the wireless there works perfectly.

I am guessing all of these problems are interrelated but I am unsure how to proceed. I've been through the wiki for mkinitcpio, for Network Configuration, Firmware, Kernel Modules, etc. and I've searched the forums but nothing seems to be quite the solution. Others at least have modules listed that won't load or network interfaces that are named but not accessible. I have neither.

Suggestions?

Last edited by wiloma (2023-01-04 23:22:16)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,919

Re: [solved] Update to 6.1.2, no network, no external drives, no touchpad

You aren't booting the kernel you think you are booting. In the vast majority of cases this means you had your /boot mounted to somewhere during initial setup of the system and don't anymore during runtime or the reverse you have it mounted now and didn't when doing the original install.

Which bootloader are you using, which instructions did you follow when installing Arch linux? From a live disk with internet and mounting all the partitions from your system where you think they should be, chroot in and post

mount
lsblk -f
tree /boot #Install the tree package

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_o … n_services

wiloma

Member

Registered: 2023-01-04

Posts: 3

Re: [solved] Update to 6.1.2, no network, no external drives, no touchpad

Bootloader is GRUB.

lsblk -f gives:

NAME   FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
loop0                                         
sda                                           
├─sda1                                        
├─sda2                                        
└─sda3                           50.6G    51% /
sdb                                           
├─sdb1                                        
└─sdb2                                        
sdc                                           
└─sdc1                                        

mount gives:

/dev/sda3 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
sys on /sys type sysfs (ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
efivarfs on /sys/firmware/efi/efivars type efivarfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,nosuid,relatime,size=873792k,nr_inodes=218448,mode=755,inode64)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000)
shm on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,inode64)
run on /run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,mode=755,inode64)
tmp on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,inode64)
run on /etc/resolv.conf type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,mode=755,inode64)

tree /boot yields:

/boot
├── initramfs-linux-fallback.img
├── initramfs-linux.img
└── vmlinuz-linux

1 directory, 3 files

I'm suspicious of GRUB here. I will try a reinstall of GRUB and report.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,919

Re: [solved] Update to 6.1.2, no network, no external drives, no touchpad

Unlikely to help as is, assuming this is an EFI install you don't have your ESP mounted here, so that's likely the issue, you mounted the ESP to /boot during install and never mounted it again.

Either mount it to /boot and fix your /etc/fstab to mount that to /boot all the time OR mount the ESP to /efi or so and install grub with

 grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/efi --bootloader-id=GRUB
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

wiloma

Member

Registered: 2023-01-04

Posts: 3

Re: [solved] Update to 6.1.2, no network, no external drives, no touchpad

Well, that was curious.

I actually used that *exact* command you list to restore GRUB (from the Arch Wiki), and I'd already rebuilt fstab a couple times, but grub-install couldn't recognize /boot or /efi as EFI partitions, even after I'd remade/erased/reinstalled/mkdir the directories twice. /dev/sda3 had no sign of ever having GRUB installed. I went into UEFI shell and into GRUB at boot, which sent me into GRUB rescue, which sent me looking for normal.mod and everything else, which weren't present on ANY partition. I couldn't get ESP to mount to /boot or /boot/efi (legacy, I know) or /efi. Yet somehow it was booting before.

Short version: It occured to me while re-reading Installation Wiki that it recommends leaving alone the EFI partition from before. I reformatted it, then reinstalled EVERYTHING except /home directory. After some wrangling with fstab that seemed to clear things up.

Interesting. Marking solved, at any rate.