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#1 2022-07-12 12:20:04

AxelFendersson
Member
Registered: 2014-12-03
Posts: 14

[SOLVED] Re-run package updates

I recently tried to update my system for the first time since February. Everything seemed to be going fine until Pacman started actually updating the packages, and I noticed that the message "error: command terminated by signal 4: illegal instruction" was popping up occasionally. When Pacman moved on to the post-install hooks, this error appeared at every stage. Then it finished and I was no longer able to run anything. Upon trying to reboot the system, the bootloader was unable to find a kernel to boot.

I've tried booting from the latest install medium and chrooting into the filesystem to try and fix things. I've re-installed a few basic components of the system and now there is a kernel in /boot that the system can see when it tries to start up. It still can't boot properly though.

I think that the thing to try at this point would be to try and re-run the update that borked the system. If I can get it to run successfully, hopefully it would reinstate everything that it had previously corrupted or failed to install properly. However, I'm not sure if there is a way to do this that doesn't involve going through /var/log/pacman.log and manually re-installing everything with pacman -S [package].

Is there a way I could tell pacman to automatically re-install everything from a list of packages, or everything that has been installed since a certain date?

Last edited by AxelFendersson (2022-07-12 14:53:34)

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#2 2022-07-12 12:43:52

Trilby
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Registered: 2011-11-29
Posts: 29,449
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Re: [SOLVED] Re-run package updates

Why bother, just get everything:

pacman -Qnq | pacman -S -

If there are still problems after than, describe what not booting looks like: where does it fail, and what errors do you get?

Last edited by Trilby (2022-07-12 12:44:31)


"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

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#3 2022-07-12 13:27:55

AxelFendersson
Member
Registered: 2014-12-03
Posts: 14

Re: [SOLVED] Re-run package updates

Trilby wrote:

Why bother, just get everything:

pacman -Qnq | pacman -S -

That's a good point!

Trilby wrote:

If there are still problems after than, describe what not booting looks like: where does it fail, and what errors do you get?

So I tried doing a re-install of everything, which seemed to go fine, but I'm still getting this when I try to boot the system:
https://www.axelfendersson.co.uk/junk/error.jpg

Last edited by AxelFendersson (2022-07-12 14:54:47)

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#4 2022-07-12 14:11:34

Trilby
Inspector Parrot
Registered: 2011-11-29
Posts: 29,449
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Re: [SOLVED] Re-run package updates

That's likely due to a faulty initramfs.  Were all your partitions properly mounted (e.g., all under /mnt) when you did the chroot and update?

While I'm pretty sure it's a bad initramfs, I'm not sure why / how it's bad, so the next steps aren't obvious to me.  But if I were in your spot, I'd try regenerating the initramfs: mount all partitions, chroot in, and either run mkinitcpio or just re-update the kernel (which will trigger the rebuild).  When you updated all packages in the previous step, the initramfs should have ran after anything it depended on, but in the off case this didn't happen, running it again now might be successful.

Last edited by Trilby (2022-07-12 14:12:32)


"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

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#5 2022-07-12 14:29:48

AxelFendersson
Member
Registered: 2014-12-03
Posts: 14

Re: [SOLVED] Re-run package updates

Yeah, all mounted fine. I only have the one root partition /mnt and the EFI boot partition at /mnt/boot.

I just tried re-updating the linux package (and the mkinitcpio package), both of which went fine and triggered a rebuild of the initramfs. Rebooted and no change.

I've also tried re-installing the bootloader (systemd-boot) to no avail.

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#6 2022-07-12 14:41:37

AxelFendersson
Member
Registered: 2014-12-03
Posts: 14

Re: [SOLVED] Re-run package updates

Managed to grab this from earlier in the boot sequence. This is not on the screen for long enough to actually read it.
https://www.axelfendersson.co.uk/junk/error2.jpg

Last edited by AxelFendersson (2022-07-12 14:54:57)

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#7 2022-07-12 14:53:11

AxelFendersson
Member
Registered: 2014-12-03
Posts: 14

Re: [SOLVED] Re-run package updates

Aha! I've just found the problem.

In my /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf I had the line

iitrd  /intel-ucode.img

Which should, of course, be

initrd  /intel-ucode.img

I think this typo has been there for a long time as I've been getting the warning about 'please update microcode' for years despite having the microcode package installed and up to date. I can only assume that something in the update meant that this error was causing much worse problems than before.

Thank you very much for your help!

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