Update a borked Arch system using the Arch Live CD

robrene · 2010-04-04 22:16:41

Hey all

My friend just called me in despair, because her laptop has ecome non functional after an update and a reboot. She tells me that she can read some sort of error about dbus, policykit and a configuration file and input output errors, and when SLiM (graphical login manager) starts, her keyboard is unresponsive (I'm guessing hal failed with dbus). Putting a 3 in the kernel parameters in GRUB didn't stop X from starting...

One of the last things she did before rebooting was a full system upgrade. She says there was a message about it failing to remove something, and her system became more and more unresponsive (pidgin crashed and her video player started acting funny). She decided it was probably best to reboot and here we are.

I'm posting this for her because she is away from home and has no access to another computer. She is going to try to burn the Arch installation media using a neighbours computer tomorrow, so that we can try to redo the update that apparently failed.

My question is, how can we archieve this? I was thinking to mount her root partition as /mnt in the live environment, and then run a cool pacman command. pacman -Syuf --root /mnt wouldn't quite do the trick, since pacman would have no way to know which packages to reinstall. What kind of magic do I need here?

Also, if someone recognises what the problem might be from the vague description above, that would be awesome. I'm guessing fixing a configuration files permissions or something is a better way to go than to nuke the system with a forced update.

.:B:. · 2010-04-04 22:58:42

Mount all the partitions from the installation CD, bring up the network, make sure you mount /sys, /proc and /dev in your root dir too, then chroot into it and just run a regular pacman update. It's a proven technique and you'll be operating on a more 'complete' system than with the --root option.

I have used it time and again, just did it a few days back with my brother's laptop where the nouveau drivers somehow messed up and I couldn't get it to boot into runlevel 3.

Also, this process has been documented times and again, so search the forum and the wiki and you'll find plenty of detail on how to proceed.

robrene · 2010-04-04 23:35:22

I figured that I couldn't possibly have been the first to come up with this cunning strategy. When you say mounting /sys, /proc, and /dev, do you mean the respective folders from the live environment? So effectively mount /sys as /mnt/sys? How would I do that? Is this what the man pages describe as "bind mount"?

I've tried searching the wiki, but I think that I'm missing some keywords, because my searches have been unfruitful...

my0pic · 2010-04-05 01:29:46

Here you go
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Change_Root
and this one too...
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ins … ting_Linux

Arch Linux

#1 2010-04-04 22:16:41

Update a borked Arch system using the Arch Live CD

#2 2010-04-04 22:58:42

Re: Update a borked Arch system using the Arch Live CD

#3 2010-04-04 23:35:22

Re: Update a borked Arch system using the Arch Live CD

#4 2010-04-05 01:29:46

Re: Update a borked Arch system using the Arch Live CD

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