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roguefirework

Member

Registered: 2025-04-30

Posts: 1

Kernel Panic after power blip when updating

My laptop's battery doesn't work so I run off of ac power. While I was at school I was updating my system and either my charger or the powerstrip I was using decided that it wanted to briefly stop delivering power while I was updating, and the computer powered off. When I turned it back it on it failed to boot.
When I attempt to boot I get the following:

:: running early hook [udev]
Starting systemd-udev version 257.5-2-arch
:: running hook [udev]
:: loading keymap...done.
:: performing fsck on 'PARTUUID=if this is important tell me, im not typing a uiid out'
:: mounting 'the partion (see above)' on real root
:: running cleanup hook [udev]
switch_root: failed to execute /sbin/init: No such file or directory 
[3.547...] kernel Panic- not syncing: attempted to kill init! Exitcide=0x00007f00
[3.547...] cpu 4 uid 0 pid: 1 comm switch root Not tainted 6.14.3-arch1-1 #1 (Wow theres a uuid here not typing that)
(More kernel Panic data if it's important I can send a picture)

While I know I could probably get a bootable usb and chroot in and try to repair the system, I was wondering if there is some way to recover the system without a USB. I have already tried pre-pending s to the boot options which gave the same error.
Thanks in advance, and apologies for any typos I'm on my phone at the moment.

Last edited by roguefirework (2025-04-30 21:56:02)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,157

Re: Kernel Panic after power blip when updating

not really trivially so without a stick no. Power failures during updates are always dicy, you might be able to do something with the fallback image if it's around, but generally speaking you're going to have to break out the USB stick here and reinstall the kernel/packages that were part of the update. Boot a live disk, make sure all partitions are properly mounted and do a chroot and reinstall all packages including the kernel that were part of the update (you can compare /var/log/pacman.log and use

sudo LC_ALL=C pacman -Qkk | grep -v ', 0 altered files' | grep -v backup

to check for corruptions and the like. If you want some kind of fail safe from the kernel side of things, install an additional kernel e.g. LTS or so and put that into your Ignore list and only update them explicitly after having verified that you were able to boot with the normal kernel after an update, or something like that.