Arch Linux

vis

Member

From: Switzerland

Registered: 2007-02-25

Posts: 81

Upgrade broke the system

Probably I ran into the infamous udev bug. Anyway my laptop hat 0.8 (Don't Panic) running for some months.

Yesterday I did a "pacman -Syu" after changing [current] to [core]. The first round went OK, that was pacman itself and few other things. On the second round it was supposed to get some 430 MB of packages, started saying the dependencies are OK but stopped half way.

Now I can't boot. It goes to rc.sysinit and lands on the place
************************ FILESYSTEM CHECK FAILED ********
* Please repair etc.

The root is ext3 on hda2. fsck.ext3 run from a CD says filesystem is OK. I thing the boot problem starts somewhat earlier,
   /etc/rc.sysinit: line 20: mount: command not found
  grep: /proc/cmdline: No such file or directory
  /etc/rc.sysinit: line 27: /bin/dmesg: no such file ...
..
:: Using static /dev filesystem
  /etc7rc.sysinit: line 201: /sbin/hwclock: No such file
  etc

all _before_ the filesystem check above.

How can I fix this?

AndyRTR

Developer

From: Magdeburg/Germany

Registered: 2005-10-07

Posts: 1,641

Re: Upgrade broke the system

it's probably the changed naming of your root device from hda to sda. you should better follow the post.install messages given by pacman and on the frontside. you will find it in our wiki how to fix the bootloader.

vis

Member

From: Switzerland

Registered: 2007-02-25

Posts: 81

Re: Upgrade broke the system

Hi Andy

Thanks for the quick reply!

I'm sure the transistion from hda to sda happened a long time(6 months?) ago. I remember walking in to that trap too :-( In that case the show stopped at grub.

Now grub moves smoothly to initrd and that finds my rc.sysinit and starts executing the script. Problems start at the mount command as described in the OP.

vis

Member

From: Switzerland

Registered: 2007-02-25

Posts: 81

Re: Upgrade broke the system

The nasty thing about the prob is, although I get the prompt "Give root password for maintenance (or type Control-D to continue)" it won't recognize the root password, ctrl-D kicks a reboot :-(

vis

Member

From: Switzerland

Registered: 2007-02-25

Posts: 81

Re: Upgrade broke the system

I tried booting from a CD (Slackware 11.0) mount /dev/hda2 on /mnt and chroot /mnt. I get the error "cannot set up thread-local storage: set_thread_area failed when setting up thread-local storage". I'm stuck.

vis

Member

From: Switzerland

Registered: 2007-02-25

Posts: 81

Re: Upgrade broke the system

Now I can boot into the system on run level 3 (sorry the reason why it did not accept the root password was the change in keyboard to US).

In fact /bin does NOT have the mount command! mkdir, mkfifo, mknod, mountpoint and mv are there but no mount! The only "mount" find shows is /usr/bin/klibc/bin/mount. Any clue?

Last edited by vis (2007-10-08 21:23:48)

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: Upgrade broke the system

What's the response if you run pacman -Syu again?

vis

Member

From: Switzerland

Registered: 2007-02-25

Posts: 81

Re: Upgrade broke the system

I wish I could do that!

Currently during the booting process I see errors starting from "mount file not found" until "Filesystem check failed give root password for maintenance" (see detailed description in my very first mail).

Once I give the root password I am in runlevel 3, no network, no mount command!

AndyRTR

Developer

From: Magdeburg/Germany

Registered: 2005-10-07

Posts: 1,641

Re: Upgrade broke the system

then boot the new released iso and use pacman -Syu --root /mnt/where_you_mounted_old_root_filesystem

vis

Member

From: Switzerland

Registered: 2007-02-25

Posts: 81

Re: Upgrade broke the system

Hi Andy

Thanks for the great trick! Took sometime to get a CD done, without a computer ;-(

Anyway, your command found some 425 MB to be fetched, and got my Yes. Then

- checking package integrity... done.

- cleaning up... done.

- (245/245) checking for file conflicts
  error: could not prepare transaction
  error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)
  shared-mint-info: /mnt/usr/share/mime/text/vnd.wap.wmlscript.xml exists in filesystem
  errors occured, no packages were upgraded.

There are three vnd.* files: vnd.rn-realtext.wml, vnd.wap.wml.xml and vnd.wap.wmlscript.xml

The third one is perhaps Unicode, there is a "broken" line as <comment>

BTW, there are 2.6 GB data in var/cache/pacman/pkg! The partition has only 470 MB left.

vis

Member

From: Switzerland

Registered: 2007-02-25

Posts: 81

Re: Upgrade broke the system

SOLVED!

Got rid of that disturbing xml and repeated the pacman command. That was a medium sized annoyence for a Monday ;-<

A few more such encounters then I understand how pacman works ;-)

Andy,
thanks for the quick support.

john_schaf

Member

From: France

Registered: 2007-02-24

Posts: 104

Re: Upgrade broke the system

I would remove the conflicting files and clean up the pacman cache using this script (if Python installed) : http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Clean_Cache
or pacman -Sc

I think it's because your disk went full that your initial upgrade failed...

edit : ooops, you posted while I was writing ....

Last edited by john_schaf (2007-10-09 09:32:43)

vis

Member

From: Switzerland

Registered: 2007-02-25

Posts: 81

Re: Upgrade broke the system

Hi John

I cleared the pacman cache with -Sc and now have 2 GB free. My root partition is "only" 10 GB but have different /home and a /backup.

"Disk full" could be a reason for the breakdown. But with 450 MB left and with root privileges I would expect pacman to continue. The _whole_ package archive was announced as 460 MB, after more than half was was 450 MB left.

May be the developers shoule have to look at that xml story.