You are not logged in.

#1 2020-03-11 13:18:33

faith
Member
Registered: 2019-09-25
Posts: 13

[Solved] System no longer boots after upgrade

HI!

Today I ran `pacman -Syyu` and the update "supposedly" succeeded, but I could see a bunch of error messages about having not enough disk space. After it finished, I checked if I have enough space and I do (80 gigs for boot partition, another ~30 for /home).

Then I used my system for a couple of minutes and decided to reboot. After rebooting, system just stays black after GRUB. No blinking cursor, no systemd output - nothing.

I chrooted and tried using Arch Rollback Machine to go back to first day of the month, but got another load of errors about files already being on the filesystem. Trying to `startx` gives me an error: Internal error: Could not resolve keysym XF86FullScreen. (Not sure if startx should even work in chroot from usb, but i wanted to try it nonetheless.)

Any suggestions on how to fix the system?

Log of the upgrade : https://gist.github.com/FaithLV/11c1a4d … 84fefd2e44

Can also provide log of the Rollback Machine errors if necessary.

Last edited by faith (2020-03-11 16:51:54)

Offline

#2 2020-03-11 13:24:32

schard
Member
From: Hannover
Registered: 2016-05-06
Posts: 1,932
Website

Re: [Solved] System no longer boots after upgrade

According to your pacman.log excerpt, /tmp was full during the post-transaction hooks.
This suggests, that you ran out of memory (RAM).
Try to run the respective hooks again manually.

Offline

#3 2020-03-11 13:41:54

faith
Member
Registered: 2019-09-25
Posts: 13

Re: [Solved] System no longer boots after upgrade

schard wrote:

According to your pacman.log excerpt, /tmp was full during the post-transaction hooks.
This suggests, that you ran out of memory (RAM).
Try to run the respective hooks again manually.

Thanks for the suggestion!

I can't find any documentation on how to run these hooks manually, would you happen to know? And is there a way to force-run the necessary hooks so I don't have to go thought the 12 thousand lines of the log file?

Offline

#4 2020-03-11 13:49:57

schard
Member
From: Hannover
Registered: 2016-05-06
Posts: 1,932
Website

Re: [Solved] System no longer boots after upgrade

No there is no easy way to do this.
You can only run them manually, as described here:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 5#p1888505
There is no such thing as

pacman --run-last-transaction-hooks

If rebuilding the initramfs does not suffice, you can simply use pacman to reinstall all installed packages. If there are file conflicts, use the --override flag wisely.

Update:
Also you should investigate as to why your /tmp was full during the upgrade. How much RAM does your machine have?

Last edited by schard (2020-03-11 13:54:59)

Offline

#5 2020-03-11 14:14:32

faith
Member
Registered: 2019-09-25
Posts: 13

Re: [Solved] System no longer boots after upgrade

I tried running

/usr/share/libalpm/scripts/mkinitcpio-install {arg}

with linux and linux-zen as arguments and it just stayed on a blinking cursor for some minutes without any progress.

Doesn't

mkinitpcio -P

do what I need?
Anyway, I ran it and it shows no errors, but the problem didn't change.

Trying to reinstall all packages at the moment.


Edit: Reinstalling all packages doesn't change a thing too.

I have 16 GBs of ram, so no idea why /tmp was full. I cleared /tmp before doing what I described above though. (I've seen similiar issues with python where if there's too many files in /tmp it would just freak out, don't know if this is releated)

Last edited by faith (2020-03-11 14:44:31)

Offline

#6 2020-03-11 14:54:16

schard
Member
From: Hannover
Registered: 2016-05-06
Posts: 1,932
Website

Re: [Solved] System no longer boots after upgrade

If /tmp is mounted in the default manner, it'll have ~8GB available in your case, which is half of your RAM.
Please provide your /etc/fstab and the output of "mount" for further investigation.
Also, what did the package reinstallation yield (output of pacman or the log)?
And finally, what's the output of

pacman -Qkk

Last edited by schard (2020-03-11 14:59:56)

Offline

#7 2020-03-11 15:38:21

faith
Member
Registered: 2019-09-25
Posts: 13

Offline

#8 2020-03-11 15:52:15

schard
Member
From: Hannover
Registered: 2016-05-06
Posts: 1,932
Website

Re: [Solved] System no longer boots after upgrade

* pacman -Qkk: looks good, only common configuration files seem to be modified.
* reinstall: Looks good too, though you should investigate the perl-warnings. I don't use perl, but the warning suggest, that cpan was used to install the modules into the /usr/lib tree, which might be a similar tool like pip for python. In any case, using third-party tools, i.e. not pacman, to install files into the library folders, is usually discouraged. Though this should not be related to your current issue.
* mount / fstab: You do not seem to have /boot mounted. So probably your kernel images and initramfs' have been written into nirvana. Clean your /boot directory on the root file system, mount yout boot partition to /boot and install the kernel(s) again.

Offline

#9 2020-03-11 16:25:49

faith
Member
Registered: 2019-09-25
Posts: 13

Re: [Solved] System no longer boots after upgrade

So, here's the process I did:

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
rm /mnt/boot/* -r
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
arch-chroot /mnt
pacman -S linux linux-zen linux-headers linux-zen-headers

This didn't change anything and after unmounting /mnt/boot, the directory is empty.
I tried copying stuff from /dev/sda1 to /mnt/boot and I'm getting an error when reaching grub:

error: symbol 'grub_file_filters_all' not found. 
Entering rescue mode... 
grub rescue>

I guess I did something wrong...

Last edited by faith (2020-03-11 16:34:24)

Offline

#10 2020-03-11 16:32:25

schard
Member
From: Hannover
Registered: 2016-05-06
Posts: 1,932
Website

Re: [Solved] System no longer boots after upgrade

How do you boot?
Why would you have a separate /boot partition in /etc/fstab if you don't configure your system to boot from it?
How did you install Arch Linux?

Offline

#11 2020-03-11 16:51:36

faith
Member
Registered: 2019-09-25
Posts: 13

Re: [Solved] System no longer boots after upgrade

Good point, looks like it's booting from in /sda2/boot not the boot partition. I wiped the /sdb2/boot, changed to boot order to boot from (UEFI OS) instead of (GRUB) at the system booted! Go figure.
I think it changed sometime when I installed Windows to another hard-drive and my fix for dual-boot introduced this discrepancy.

Anyway, I don't exactly how this happened as I installed arch (for the first time, and first time using linux, so sorry if I can't expand) ~2.5 years ago and never done it since.

Thank you very much for your help!

Offline

Board footer

Powered by FluxBB