Arch Linux

stefano

Member

Registered: 2011-04-09

Posts: 287

Recovering from a pacman crash during kernel update?

Pacman crashed and hanged my system during a routine system update, while it was updating the kernel.

I was left with an unusable system with no kernel files and after a hard restart the system refused to boo againt, since it was missing vmlinuz

I booted into an emergency image, deleted the pacman lock file and reinstalled the linux package (and the linux-lts package).

I was able to reboot and I thought everything was going well when I found out that pacman itself is now in a corrupt state: most packages' files are no longer recognized as belonging to pacman, so it refuses to update them. Pacman complains the files exist in the filesystem and refuses to overwrite them (as it should, of course, in a normal situation). Initially I thought this was a problem limited to a few packages and I proceeded to manually delete the affected files before reinstalling them. But it seems that the problem affects all previously installed packages.

Is there a way out of this situation or am I just better off wiping the installation and rebuilding the system from scratch? I would rather avoid that if possible, of course.

jasonwryan

Anarchist

From: .nz

Registered: 2009-05-09

Posts: 30,426

Website

Re: Recovering from a pacman crash during kernel update?

Read the pacman page on the wiki, there is a section on exactly this scenario.

And make some effort to help yourself. No research and completely wrong board.

Last edited by jasonwryan (2020-07-07 17:12:52)

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Registered Linux User #482438

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,701

Re: Recovering from a pacman crash during kernel update?

...or am I just better off wiping the installation and rebuilding the system from scratch?

Almost never.

If you can boot from the install media and mount your volumes, it is invariably easier to fix.

Edit:  Moving to "Newbie Corner"

Last edited by ewaller (2020-07-07 17:38:34)

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