[SOLVED] Broken system after crash interrupted system upgrade

gpsolo · 2024-04-02 01:46:24

I was upgrading my system with the command ‘yay -Syu’ when the system crashed for an unknown reason, once I rebooted I was met with a black screen and 0 text. I chrooted into my install with a live boot image and was able to reinstall linux itself but after rebooting the system still leads blank screen minus the boot splash from Plymouth and the unlock screen for my Luks partitions. I get a couple messages about my D-Bus failing to start along with others failing to start as well.

After some looking I executed this command

sudo LC_ALL=C pacman -Qkk 2>&1 | grep -v ', 0 altered files'

however the output is so long and within the live boot tty I cannot make sense of it all. Please help, I’ve tried running yay after su’ing to my original user but I don’t think that yay is supposed to work in a live boot as it outputs nothing.
I would share the output of the previously mentioned command but I cannot find any reliable way to do that since the file is so large pastebin won’t accept it and I don’t wanna send a sketchy link to a random file sharing service unless explicitly requested.

Last edited by gpsolo (2024-04-04 17:35:07)

seth · 2024-04-02 07:11:12

a sketchy link to a random file sharing service

sudo LC_ALL=C pacman -Qkk 2>&1 | grep -v ', 0 altered files' > /tmp/howbadisit.txt
cat /tmp/howbadisit.txt | curl -F 'file=@-' 0x0.st

The content will reveal some of the software you've installed and probabyl what config files you touched

Then see https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 3#p2161783
Obviously the list there doesn't apply to you and if the installed pacman is compromised or you cannot chroot into the system you might have to use --root and --cachedir

gpsolo · 2024-04-04 17:33:34

Okay, I was able to serve the .txt file to another computer with the python http.server module and after downloading it on the other computer I made a list of the packages that was in the .txt and I reinstalled them from a chroot but I used 'pacman -S --overwrite "*" <packages>' which seemed to work instead of just 'pacman -S' I'm not sure if this was the best way to do this but I kept running into the error 'ldconfig: File /usr/lib/<package/library> is empty, not checked' and '/usr/lib/<*> exists in filesystem' so maybe it was more than one issue which would explain why the 'pacman -Syu' from a chroot didn't initially work. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

seth · 2024-04-04 20:17:48

'pacman -S --overwrite "*"' will "work" but you blindly steamroll over the system - it's not the most elegant or harmless approach.

You'll get "is empty" for broken files and "exists in filesystem" for broken databases where the latter will actually prevent an update.
Thus the proper™ way to address this is to first fix the database/package meta info, then re-install the pacakges with broken files.

Arch Linux

#1 2024-04-02 01:46:24

[SOLVED] Broken system after crash interrupted system upgrade

#2 2024-04-02 07:11:12

Re: [SOLVED] Broken system after crash interrupted system upgrade

#3 2024-04-04 17:33:34

Re: [SOLVED] Broken system after crash interrupted system upgrade

#4 2024-04-04 20:17:48

Re: [SOLVED] Broken system after crash interrupted system upgrade

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