Arch Linux

usr

Member

Registered: 2006-07-26

Posts: 20

upgrading from 32 to 64 bit

Today was an interesting day.
I looked at archlinux.org. I saw the warning about KMS and nvidia. I thought "that doesn't apply to me" and proceeded to upgrade. Then I rebooted and all was not well. The screen went black just after udev started. So I played around a bit. I booted a livecd and looked for hints to no avail.
Then I remember the usb stick with the latest archlinux image and thought "Aha. I'll use that to replace the kernel and other possibly screwed up bits." So I did that (after playing with chroot and mkinitcpio for a while). Then I had more problems. I didn't even get the blank screen.
It turns out that the image was the 64bit one and my computer had been running 32 bit. So rather than do the obvious and download a new 32bit image or do install 64bit from scratch I continued installing the 64bit packages over the top of the old one. Then I rebooted and it worked but only programs from the base install. Everything else complained about the elfs. So, to cut a long story short, I got pacman to replace every program with the 64bit version and now everything is working perfectly (so far) and is set up exactly as it was this morning (before the upgrade).

Anyway the point of this is that it is possible to upgrade from 32bit to 64bit but I wouldn't recommend it
(I wouldn't have bothered if I hadn't been eyeing 64bit for the larger long doubles)

oh and for the curious I think that the reason i had the initial problem was that I had nouveau installed even though I wasn't using it so all I actually needed to do was remove nouveau but I only discovered that when trying the 64bit with nouveau. Whoops

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Do you ever get that "Oops" feeling?

jolinfire

Member

From: France

Registered: 2007-12-21

Posts: 176

Re: upgrading from 32 to 64 bit

The simplest way to upgrade from 32 to 64 bit is to reinstall your arch, in the hope you have a /home partition. Using a 64 bit version of arch since day 1 of my install and no problem at all on it. Ok, just this crappy flash