Arch Linux

BrianC

Member

Registered: 2022-02-08

Posts: 16

[SOLVED]Trying to recover from system crash during upgrade (Virtualbox

Hi,

My VM "crashed" during an update and is no longer bootable. I booted with the install disk thinking I could just rerun the update but I get that there is not enough disk space when in fact there are many available. It always reports only 63143 blocks available and halts the upgrade. Always exactly the same number unchanged by adding or deleting files.

I thought I would mount the vdi in another vm, chroot into it and reinstall. But that didn't work. From there I was able to verify that there are over 20G free on the disk.

Since I can access the disk there is no risk of data loss. I just spent a lot of time installing and setting up an environment I liked and I really don't want to start from scratch.

I'd appreciate any ideas you might have.

Thanks

Last edited by BrianC (2022-07-05 16:44:09)

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 13,729

Re: [SOLVED]Trying to recover from system crash during upgrade (Virtualbox

I assume you're running pacman from the install disk with --root? If so, make sure to use --cachedir as well.

BrianC

Member

Registered: 2022-02-08

Posts: 16

Re: [SOLVED]Trying to recover from system crash during upgrade (Virtualbox

I'll try that, thanks. You mean pacman -Syu --root --cachedir right?

BrianC

Member

Registered: 2022-02-08

Posts: 16

Re: [SOLVED]Trying to recover from system crash during upgrade (Virtualbox

I discovered pacstrap which allowed me to arch-chroot. It says everything is up to day. There are no entries in /etc/fstab so that's a problem but it does make me wonder if there are other conf files that are messed up. Is there some command that will rebuild/restore conf files to their initial install state?

Slithery

Administrator

From: Norfolk, UK

Registered: 2013-12-01

Posts: 5,776

Re: [SOLVED]Trying to recover from system crash during upgrade (Virtualbox

The default fstab doesn't have any entries. If you want to use it you have to create them yourself either manually or by using genfstab.

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BrianC

Member

Registered: 2022-02-08

Posts: 16

Re: [SOLVED]Trying to recover from system crash during upgrade (Virtualbox

Thanks. I've managed to genfstab for the old drive and it looks correct. But when I boot it says vmlinuz-linux not found. But I can see it is there from the other machine. I tried a force reinstall of linux but that did not change anything.

BrianC

Member

Registered: 2022-02-08

Posts: 16

Re: [SOLVED]Trying to recover from system crash during upgrade (Virtualbox

Just to close this out: I ended up just installing a new machine and copying over the data I needed from the old vdi. I got to use the new installer which is nice but has it's quirks. Anyway thanks for your input.

BrianC

Member

Registered: 2022-02-08

Posts: 16

Re: [SOLVED]Trying to recover from system crash during upgrade (Virtualbox

I would like to mark this as solved but I don't see where I do that.

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,692

Re: [SOLVED]Trying to recover from system crash during upgrade (Virtualbox

I would like to mark this as solved but I don't see where I do that.

We are old school here.  Edit your first post in the thread.  Editing that one post allows you to edit the title.  Just prepend "[SOLVED]"; but your title is fairly long, so you may need to truncate it or express it more concisely.

Last edited by ewaller (2022-07-05 16:23:26)

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BrianC

Member

Registered: 2022-02-08

Posts: 16

Re: [SOLVED]Trying to recover from system crash during upgrade (Virtualbox

You were right. I character too long.