borked Arch. fresh install, or drastic measures to resurrect?

ninjaaron · 2013-01-07 02:29:19

So I've had Arch on this other box for 2+ years with no reinstallations. We've had some crazy times, but I always brought it back. Went to check something on it last night, and there was a kernel panic for no reason that I could discern. It was unbootable after that. I could chroot into it, but I couldn't reinstall grub or mkinitpcio because my boot partition was full (I made it way too small). I messed around and did some of the normal recovery things, but to no avail.

Anyway, I could take drastic measures, backup the / partition, and try to rebuild the bootloader and init scripts on a fresh partition, but I'm kind of thinking maybe it's time for a fresh start anyway. I've been running the system since before squeeze was released, much longer than I've ever maintained an install of any other distro, and it's getting crufty, I think. /home is fine, in any event. So, should I just go for the fresh install? That's what I'm leaning toward right now. The only reason I can see to try and bring it back is the hackz0rz cred of maintaining an Arch install for a really long time, and that doesn't seem like a good enough reason.

P.S. I also have Ubuntu 12.04 on there right now until I figure out what I want to do with Arch. Anyone think I should just stick with 'buntu on that machine? (I'm not gonna lie, I love 12.04. If Unity could do real tiling, I would probably never leave).

Last edited by ninjaaron (2013-01-07 02:38:23)

WonderWoofy · 2013-01-07 02:44:10

It kind of sounds like your mind is already made up. I am not sure what your defenition of "crufty" is, but I would simply try to fix that. If your /boot is too small, why not just use your root partition. As long as it is a filesystem which a bootloader of some kind can recognize, you should have no problem. So I would imagine that as long as your rootfs is FAT, ext[2-4], btrfs, jfs, xfs, nilfs, ntfs, zfs, ufs, tar, cpio, reiserfs, or squashfs you can at least use grub2 to boot it (grub-bios).

It sounds to me like you want to reinstall or possibly change distros. I don't think anyone here can really help you with that in particular. But I do feel as though your current system is likely recoverable.

lucke · 2013-01-07 02:53:55

I've never reinstalled Arch on my PCs, and I've had quite a few filesystems broken. This installation is more than 8 years old and I've noticed my boot partition is getting small (can't hold three kernels with mkinitcpio images anymore!) - you can make it bigger with (g)parted or perhaps you can (temporarily) remove mkinitcpio images or vmlinuz files that you don't need at the moment, if you have more than one kernel installed. You probably can fix it without creating new partitions/doing anything excessive.

It is up to you if you want to have some challenge rescuing it, perhaps learning something along the way, or reinstall and then go through the trouble of configuring it again (or importing /etc) and installing whatever software you had, or stick with Ubuntu.

-edit-

You could try PyTyle with compiz/unity.

Last edited by lucke (2013-01-07 03:06:50)

andjeng · 2013-01-07 07:36:42

if it's worth enough to reinstall, why not.
once upon a time, i reinstall my installation just for fun.
(i know, it's off topic, but.....)
anyway, just format your boot + root partition (after back your stuff up) and resize it.

Arch Linux

#1 2013-01-07 02:29:19

borked Arch. fresh install, or drastic measures to resurrect?

#2 2013-01-07 02:44:10

Re: borked Arch. fresh install, or drastic measures to resurrect?

#3 2013-01-07 02:53:55

Re: borked Arch. fresh install, or drastic measures to resurrect?

#4 2013-01-07 07:36:42

Re: borked Arch. fresh install, or drastic measures to resurrect?

Board footer