Arch Linux

ieracos

Member

Registered: 2010-02-06

Posts: 2

[SOLVED] Change the repo and mess up everything. Is a way to revert?

Hi guys. It here is a story that maybe will make you lol a lot, but I ensure you I'm not lolling at all. I have arch i686 on an Athlon64 3200+ with 1Gb of RAM. Yesterday I changed my repo from mi.mirror.garr.it (that is always outdated and sometimes misses some packages) to mirror.lividpenguin.com. I made the upgrade: pacman downloaded A LOT of packages (about 150), but after installing some of them it started to fail installing the others. Many running programs stopped to work, so I rebooted. The boot process stopped quite soon, saying that it can't find the root fs that is indicated with the partition uuid. So I found that the /dev dir was very poor populated (only the tty* console zero and few others, but NO disk at all). Booting from a live distro I found that the fs on the disk (ReiserFS) it's ok, everything is readable, nothing is corrupted. After that I discovered the reason of the malfunctions: I copied/pasted the repo link and not noticed that it said "x86_64" at the end of the line So bad
I checked some binary executables (Xorg for example) and I found that in fact they were 64bit. At this point my question is: is there a way to revert the upgrade and recover my distro without formatting and reinstalling everything? From the time I was a Gentoo user, I remember that there was in Gentoo an easy way to rebuild the entire system: is there a similar thing in Arch that permits me to reinstall everything (even with a non working environment) without loosing personal data, conf files, etc.? Or, have you an idea to recover the situation in a non-destructive way?
Thanks

Last edited by ieracos (2010-02-10 19:33:38)

mykey

Member

From: out of the blue

Registered: 2007-03-02

Posts: 113

Re: [SOLVED] Change the repo and mess up everything. Is a way to revert?

hi and welcome

the dev dir not getting populated is most probably a udev thing - downgrading udev to version 1.46 could fix that - if you have a backup of the pacman database you can rebuild your system exactly the way it was before things went wrong - check out the wiki for 'pacman tips'

sdolim

Member

Registered: 2010-01-20

Posts: 67

Re: [SOLVED] Change the repo and mess up everything. Is a way to revert?

Expanding on mykey's advice:  you likely have copies of your old pre-upgrade packages in the pacman cache.  Look in /etc/pacman.conf, property CacheDir=, for the directory where they are stored.  Then use "pacman -U /that/directory/some-package-old-version.pkg.tar.gz" to revert some-package to the old version.

Last edited by sdolim (2010-02-06 22:20:50)

ieracos

Member

Registered: 2010-02-06

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] Change the repo and mess up everything. Is a way to revert?

Thank you guys! You gave me the right idea! I should have had this idea by myself... However, it took me a couple of days (I was very busy this week), but now, with a little bit of hard work and a little help from scripting, everything is restored! And I have KDE 4.4 too
ihihih
Thanks very much