Arch Linux

evilviper77

Member

Registered: 2008-04-12

Posts: 15

[Solved] Screwup installing new kernel. Filesystem now read-only.

So I had a bit of a flub happen. I was installing the new (well new to me; I haven't used my arch linux side in a few months) kernel for arch one night and went to sleep while it finished downloading the 1gig of updates.

When I woke up I noticed an error message about a cd being in the cd-rom and it not being able to unmount or update or something (can't remember exactly). It had turned off my cd-rom so I couldn't take it out so I just figured I would restart my laptop and take it out during the boot sequence (it was early, I had just woken up and wasn't thinking straight sadly). So I did that, and was greeted with a ton of error messages at the bootup screen which looped infinitely and never fully booted up.

I managed to find a topic that mentioned adding '1' to the end of my kernel line in the grub bootloader options to start up in level 1 and so I can log in through that; but the problem is the file-system is in read-only and some of the important commands (like mount) were uninstalled and I can't use them (though fsck works).

So is there anyway to fix this or am I just SOL and need to reinstall arch? I'd prefer not to since I have lots of scripts and other files I've written and don't want to have to redo; so I suppose worst case would be to find some way to copy those off so I can just put them back in. Thanks.

Last edited by evilviper77 (2011-04-22 15:54:44)

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: [Solved] Screwup installing new kernel. Filesystem now read-only.

Boot with a rescue cd/usb, chroot in, fix whatever needs to be fixed.

If you think your data is in danger, back it up first.

evilviper77

Member

Registered: 2008-04-12

Posts: 15

Re: [Solved] Screwup installing new kernel. Filesystem now read-only.

That did the trick; thanks for the quick save!