Arch Linux

thunderphenol

Member

Registered: 2024-03-31

Posts: 7

[SOLVED] System hanged while updating and now hangs on boot

Hello,

While I was doing a regular system upgrade via sudo pacman -Syu, the system hanged mid update and was unresponsive for >30mins.

The packages that I believe were being upgraded are: rygel, pcsclite, util-linux and util-linux-libs

With a lot of hesitancy I had to shut it down via holding down the power key as any other options were unresponsive. Now, the system hangs while booting with the final message in the cli being:

running cleanup hook [udev]

I have now chrooted into my root partition from my arch usb drive but I cannot figure out how to reinstall the packages since the —force option is discontinued on pacman.

Thanks and I apologize if I am missing something obvious.

Last edited by thunderphenol (2024-05-08 00:34:10)

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 18,916

Re: [SOLVED] System hanged while updating and now hangs on boot

Please post the link the following generates,  which checks packages for changes:

# LC_ALL=C pacman -Qkk 2>&1 | grep -v ', 0 altered files' | tee /tmp/broken_packages.txt
cat /tmp/broken_packages.txt | curl -F 'file=@-' 0x0.st

thunderphenol

Member

Registered: 2024-03-31

Posts: 7

Re: [SOLVED] System hanged while updating and now hangs on boot

Thanks for the quick reply.

Heres the output to that: http://0x0.st/X8TE.txt

Edit: Checked the pacman log to find a bunch of “^@“ messages highlighted in blue for like 5 rows, could this be relevant to the problem? It follows after “[ALPM] running ‘30-systemd-update.hook’” and right before is the pacman -Syu message from the chroot.

Last edited by thunderphenol (2024-05-08 00:27:27)

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 18,916

Re: [SOLVED] System hanged while updating and now hangs on boot

pcsclite: no mtree file
rygel: no mtree file
util-linux: no mtree file
util-linux-libs: no mtree file

From the chroot first reinstall those packages with `--dbonly` then  without:

pacman -S --dbonly pcsclite rygel util-linux util-linux-libs
pacman -S pcsclite rygel util-linux util-linux-libs

Does the system then boot normally?

thunderphenol

Member

Registered: 2024-03-31

Posts: 7

Re: [SOLVED] System hanged while updating and now hangs on boot

Yup, Thanks so much I was one step away from just wiping everything and starting over. Marking the thread as solved.

Looks like ill have to research more into pacman and its parameters.

EDIT/UPDATE: The issue happened to me again, but was able to recover successfully after some trial. This is what I understand happened: 
If the system hangs when critical parts of it are updating, many things can fail, including arch-chroot, making it impossible to chroot into the system. To go around this,

 pacman --root=/mnt --cachedir=/mnt/var/cache/pacman/pkg (command here: e.g. -S, -Syu or -Qkk) 

In my case ncurses was broken, making it so that bash would throw an error when trying to arch-chroot in.
If it was updating the linux kernel, the bootloader wont show the image required to run the linux kernel. To solve this I had to chroot in (So if applicable do the above first and be sure to mount your boot partition aswell), then reinstall those via

 pacman -S --dbonly linux linux-headers 

then

 pacman -S linux linux-headers 

include the lts version aswell if you use it. This generated the required images to boot successfully and my system runs perfectly now. Hope it helps.

Last edited by thunderphenol (2024-05-25 15:59:30)