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kabads

Member

Registered: 2012-09-22

Posts: 271

Website

[Solved] Kernel fails to boot

Ran an update yesterday and kernel fails to boot this morning with:

/sbin/init: error while loading shared libraries: /usr/lib/systemd/libsystemd-shared-238.so: invalid ELF header

... then a whole load of code with kernel panic.

Am I going to need a new live boot media to rescue this and if so, what should I do once I've booted in to that environment?
TIA

Last edited by kabads (2018-06-17 12:32:52)

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,543

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Re: [Solved] Kernel fails to boot

Am I going to need a new live boot media to rescue this

That would be the best way.  If that would really be a problem, there are other options to pass init= on the kernel command line and use a shell instead.  But this has it's own source of hurdles.  If a live usb is at all possible, you'll want to make one.

what should I do once I've booted in to that environment?

The steps to fix this are almost certainly to just reinstall systemd on the target system.  But if it were me I'd want to figure out what went wrong and how.  Posting your pacman.log here would help with that.  Did anything unusual happen during your last update?  Unusual output from pacman, a power failure, etc?  Knowing how this happened would help pinpoint whether other libs/files might have been similarly affected.

Last edited by Trilby (2018-06-16 12:33:31)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

mxfm

Member

Registered: 2015-10-23

Posts: 166

Re: [Solved] Kernel fails to boot

Ran an update yesterday...

/sbin/init: error while loading shared libraries: /usr/lib/systemd/libsystemd-shared-238.so: invalid ELF header

Apart from advice how to be rescued, how did you run the update?

kabads

Member

Registered: 2012-09-22

Posts: 271

Website

Re: [Solved] Kernel fails to boot

@mxfm - I ran the update with pacman -Syu

This is now solved with @Trilby's advice. I created a boot usb media- then mounted the /boot and / partitions - then chrooted into that environment - pacman -U systemd-238.133-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz   (which was on a different USB stick) and then exit the environment and reboot.

Thankyou both for your advice and time.