Wrong Kernel Selected After Upgrade

finch127 · 2015-06-28 15:19:26

Hello all,

I am having a strange issue, whenever I take a kernel update on my laptop and reboot, it boots into the old kernel and refuses to mount my EFI partition, and the wireless card, etc do not work presumably because all the modules are for the new kernel and are in the wrong place. On my desktop, this never happens, it always boots into the correct kernel and I never have to do anything else. I am not sure what is causing it, because I never configured anything on my desktop to automatically select the new kernel, but on my laptop this never happens. Is this a change in behavior recently, does pacman not automatically trigger the update?

I don't know where to post this issue so forgive me if this is the wrong place.

Also does anyone have any tips on an easier way to fix this? What I have been doing is booting into my arch usb installation stick and mounting all the partitions manually, chrooting over and updating grub, this seems to boot right up, and if not I just reinstall the kernel and run mkinitcpio and then update grub and that works. Is there a way I can fix this from the old kernel not having to use installation media? I think not, unless I can load the driver to mount my EFI partition manually and then update grub from the old kernel, but I am unaware of where it is located so I wouldn't know how to do this.

Thanks mates! Hopefully if anyone else has this issue they can help me out.

WorMzy · 2015-06-28 15:22:10

Sounds like your boot partition isn't mounted when you upgrade your linux package.

OR

Your boot partition is mounted, but your bootloader is actually installed to your root partition and is looking for kernels there.

Post your fstab and boot loader configuration.

Mod note: Moving to newbie corner.

finch127 · 2015-06-28 15:35:46

Hello, thanks for the quick response, I think you are entirely right, my boot partition was not in my fstab for some reason. I added it and I think it should be fine from now on. It's definitely mounted now. Also I think this may be the difference between my laptop and desktop: my desktop fstab has everything in it for sure.

I suspected this much earlier, but I still had to boot into the installation media to change it because even after I made the edit to fstab it wouldn't boot it due to not having the vfat driver. Do you have any tips for how to load this so I don't need to use the installation media? Even though this issue is solved now, it would be handy to know.

WorMzy · 2015-06-28 16:06:24

Chances are it can't load the vfat module because your kernel and modules have become desyncronised (e.g. you're booting 4.0.4, but you have the modules for 4.0.6). Reinstalling the linux package (with 'pacman -U /path/to/cached/package') while your boot partition is mounted should fix that.

You might want to consider adding vfat to your MODULES array in your mkinitcpio.conf, so that the vfat module for your kernel is always loaded at boot time. That way, if your kernel and modules become desyncronised for some reason, you can still mount your boot partition and fix it.

Arch Linux

#1 2015-06-28 15:19:26

Wrong Kernel Selected After Upgrade

#2 2015-06-28 15:22:10

Re: Wrong Kernel Selected After Upgrade

#3 2015-06-28 15:35:46

Re: Wrong Kernel Selected After Upgrade

#4 2015-06-28 16:06:24

Re: Wrong Kernel Selected After Upgrade

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