Arch Linux

siege801

Member

Registered: 2021-12-01

Posts: 1

"Invalid Magic Number" + "load the kernel first" after pacman -Syu

Hello everyone,

I'm still relatively new to Arch linux but am loving it so far. One of my main motivations for installing Arch was to get my head and hands around more of the intricacies of how Linux works. To that end, while I've already fixed my problem, I'd like to have some help on identifying what went wrong.

Yesterday I ran `pacman -Syu` on my installation, and everything appeared to update ok - I didn't think anything else of it.

It wasn't until today that I rebooted to switch into a different OS that, upon trying to boot back into Arch I received:

error: invalid magic number
error: you need to load kernel first

Grub was enabling me to switch between my two my three OSes (Kali and Pop_OS), but clearly something had run afoul with Arch. The solution for me was simply to:

1/ Boot into my Arch live USB
2/ mount Arch's root to /mnt; the boot partition to /mnt/boot and enable the swap partition
3/ arch-chroot /mnt
4/ pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware
5/ pacman -Syu
6/ Reboot, and it was working

I understand that by doing this I've re-installed the base, linux and linux-firmware packages, and then upgraded all installed packages. What I'd like to know / do is determine what went wrong in the first place.

Here is my pacman.log that covers the most recent 'pacman -Syu' runs. To me, everything looks ok (I think?). Are there any other log files I could look into to try and determine what happened?

Many thanks in advance.

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 14,854

Re: "Invalid Magic Number" + "load the kernel first" after pacman -Syu

the boot partition to /mnt/boot

Was your boot partition mounted with the update where things went wrong ?

If unsure
boot the live usb again
only mount archroot  / , not the boot partition .
look at /mnt/boot : is it empty ?

Last edited by Lone_Wolf (2021-12-01 12:14:34)

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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