Arch Linux

geniuz

Member

Registered: 2010-04-10

Posts: 127

MacBook 4.1 can't boot after upgrade

Hey everyone,

Just half an hour ago I did a full system upgrade on my MacBook 4.1 running Arch64 and the system seems to be broken. Right after the update, I couldn't mount any devices and couldn't even shutdown my laptop. So I did a hard reboot and to my surprise it doesn't even boot anymore. At first it hangs on "Loading Modules" where it gives a bunch of:

ehci_hcd: gave up wating for init of module usbcore
ehci_hcd: Unknown symbol usb_hcd_resume_root_hub

Which repeats itself over 10 minutes for a bunch of unknown symbols in usbcore. Eventually it gets passed this point but then gets stuck at:

Setting consoles to UTF-8 mode

After which my only remaining action is to do a hard shutdown. Also in the ouput during my boot process, at random stages I see the line:

/etc/rc.sysinit: line [some number] [some number] Killed /sbin/hwclock $HWCLCOCK_PARAMS --noadjfile

This all indicates something is seriously messed up I think. Now I remember doing a full system upgrade at least two weeks ago...so I don't think its the timeframe. Also, at this point this is the only output I have since I can't boot into my system anymore. My feeling says both usbcore and acpi broke somewhere along the way. I really have no idea what caused this or how to fix it, so I hope you can give me some input on that.

Thanks !

geniuz

Member

Registered: 2010-04-10

Posts: 127

Re: MacBook 4.1 can't boot after upgrade

Ok, I think I traced the problem back in that I forgot to run "lilo" after the upgrade. However I found out about this after I installed grub, which failed. Now my entire boot record is screwed up...is there any way to completely erase the bootloader from my arch partition and reinstall it from a chroot environment, still preserving the partition itself though ?

geniuz

Member

Registered: 2010-04-10

Posts: 127

Re: MacBook 4.1 can't boot after upgrade

To answer my own question, I did the following which should erase my bootloader:

dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/sda3 count=1 bs=512

from an arch live-cd. sda3 is the partition which contains / and hence /boot/. Also, I completely uninstalled grub from my system, installed lilo and ran lilo which confirmed images being added to boot menu. However if I reboot my system it goes to refit and if I select arch it shortly shows "GRUB" after which it reboots. Hence GRUB seems to be still there, be it broken, which I find very odd. Anyway, I think I'm just going to reinstall arch since I've wasted my whole day on this with no success what so ever.