Arch Linux

Cheezmeister

Member

Registered: 2022-07-05

Posts: 1

Pacman crashed, cannot boot. Am I doomed to drop into recovery?

Hello friends. I need some advice.

The last time I used my system, I tried installing upgrades with 'pacman -Syuv' ; having been away for a while, there were lots of packages staged. Well after maybe 30 minutes of chugging along, the process exited with a segfault; I tried again once, same result.

Heeding the wisdom of the ancients, I tried turning it off and back on again, to be greeted by this:

Error loading \vmlinuz\linux: Not Found
Failed to execute Arch Linux (\vmlinuz-linux): Not Found

That message stays on screen for a moment, then the system soft reboots, POSTs again, repeat, repeat.

At this point I'm guessing that a kernel update was included in this big upgrade, and that the old image got removed/renamed prior to the crash, but not restored afterwards. Is this more or less accurate?

I'm also guessing that I could have patched things up while the system was still running, had I known about this injury, but that by rebooting I forfeited that chance, and now need some external boot media. I have an install CD lying around somewhere, but it's quite out of date. This machine is the only one of mine that physically has  a disc drive, so I can't (easily) burn a new one either. Booting from USB is, I think, possible and my best option.

Is there any way to interrupt the normal boot process to use a fallback image, or anything of that nature? If so, I'd like to try that first.

tl;dr

pacman -Syuv failed with a segfault and now my system won't boot. Can I recover from this without installation media?

Bradley

Member

Registered: 2022-06-25

Posts: 20

Re: Pacman crashed, cannot boot. Am I doomed to drop into recovery?

Sounds like pacman crashed right when it was overwriting the old kernel.

If you use GRUB, and the menu shows up, try booting the advanced options. If you have a secondary kernel it might boot.

If you don’t feel like making new installation media, the CD should be fine.

If you want to make installation media, and you have a flash drive lying around, go to the downloads page. You will also need an ISO burner tool, like Rufus. https://rufus.ie/en/

You might be able to recover without reinstalling by mounting the drives and chrooting. After you can try to update the system again. You might have to also reinstall the kernel and update the boot loader. Good luck!

Last edited by Bradley (2022-07-10 18:11:56)