[Solved] Arch screwed during update

ypnos · 2011-11-08 09:55:54

Hi,

yesterday night I started a system upgrade and it went wrong. Just after updating glibc I got the error message in my pacman output:
"too many levels of symbolic links"

Problem is, this error message is returned whatever binary I started to try.
# vi
/usr/bin/vi: too many levels of symbolic links
# ls
/bin/ls: too many levels of symbolic links
... and so on

I also cannot open a new terminal, because bash won't be executed. init also does not work.

Any ideas what went wrong and how I may resolve this?

thx,
Johannes

Last edited by ypnos (2011-11-09 14:57:13)

tomk · 2011-11-08 10:20:45

Boot with your favourite live distro, chroot into Arch, pacman -Syu again.

As for what went wrong, I couldn't say without additional details.

eworm · 2011-11-08 14:19:53

tomk wrote:

Boot with your favourite live distro, chroot into Arch, pacman -Syu again.
As for what went wrong, I couldn't say without additional details.

I suppose that does not work either.

Boot a rescue system, extract ld-2.14.1.so from glibc package (should be in /var/cache/pacman/pkg/) to /lib on your system, then link /lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 to ld-2.14.1.so. Reboot and everything should be fine.

jasonwryan · 2011-11-08 17:14:02

eworm wrote:

Boot a rescue system, extract ld-2.14.1.so from glibc package (should be in /var/cache/pacman/pkg/) to /lib on your system, then link /lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 to ld-2.14.1.so. Reboot and everything should be fine.

I would reinstall glibc using pacman rather than symlinking libraries...

eworm · 2011-11-08 17:26:45

jasonwryan wrote:

eworm wrote:
Boot a rescue system, extract ld-2.14.1.so from glibc package (should be in /var/cache/pacman/pkg/) to /lib on your system, then link /lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 to ld-2.14.1.so. Reboot and everything should be fine.
I would reinstall glibc using pacman rather than symlinking libraries...

Usually... Yes.
But it will complain about too many levels of symbolic links.

Just thinking about something else... If you have a live system with pacman you could try:

* mount your arch root partition
* do NOT chroot to it (as it would give too many levels of symbolic links... You know.
* Install glibc with

pacman -b <mountpoint>/var/lib/pacman/ -r <mountpoint>/ -S glibc

ypnos · 2011-11-09 14:58:33

Just wanted to know that what has happend was my own fault. I screwed with the filesystem at the wrong place and forgot about it.

Manually extracting from glibc package worked fine. Afterwards I took care of re-installing all packages that had problems updating after the glibc issue (a simple pipeline starting at /var/log/pacman.log, going over grep, grep, cut, then into pacman).

Last edited by ypnos (2011-11-09 14:59:09)

Arch Linux

#1 2011-11-08 09:55:54

[Solved] Arch screwed during update

#2 2011-11-08 10:20:45

Re: [Solved] Arch screwed during update

#3 2011-11-08 14:19:53

Re: [Solved] Arch screwed during update

#4 2011-11-08 17:14:02

Re: [Solved] Arch screwed during update

#5 2011-11-08 17:26:45

Re: [Solved] Arch screwed during update

#6 2011-11-09 14:58:33

Re: [Solved] Arch screwed during update

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