Arch Linux

RowdyRoedy

Member

Registered: 2015-08-20

Posts: 2

Arch Complete Recovery from unbootable

I made a boo boo :-(

I was cross compiling some arm drivers for Xorg and accidentally installed them on my host file system.  I can get into grub and launch Arch Linux but my system gets stuck during boot.  The last thing I see is

starting version 239
/dev/sda3: clean, <numbers>/<numbers> files, <numbers>/<numbers> blocks

From this point I can ctrl+alt+del to restart, but I can't ctrl+alt+F2/F3 etc to get into a terminal

Not being a *complete* chump I figured I could just boot from a live USB and reinstall all my packages.  After booting with the USB stick I run

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/home
arch-chroot /mnt

This seems to work!

Following some info I got from other threads, I then run

pacman -S `pacman -Qnq`

I ignore my gcc and gcc-libs updates (I have these in my ignore group as they are required for yocto building) and then pacman tries to reinstall all of my packages.

I get a bunch of warnings...

warning: could not get file information for usr/include/libdrm/<all of the drm files>

This makes sense given that libdrm is one of the things I was cross compiling.

Pacman then craps out on me when it tries to write /etc/resolve.conf

**EDIT** while writing this post I fixed the problem
Pacman installs 3 packages just fine, but throws the error on the 4th package, which is 'filesystem'.  Since I already have a "working" filesystem I just added 'filesystem' to the ignore group in /etc/pacman.conf, then ran the previous command and everything is back up and running.  I'm leaving this post here in the hopes that it helps some other wayward soul fix their problems.

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 15,060

Re: Arch Complete Recovery from unbootable

better run pacman -Qkk to verify which packages still have problems.

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Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky