Hello dear community,
Unfortunately, I have to turn to you for unpleasant reasons. I’m sure many of you have already experienced it. The download of my system update (under tty3) suddenly stopped without a message, it simply said “Finished”. Strangely enough, and it’s actually getting weird for me, as I think it was the same last time. If anyone suspects why this might be, I’d be interested to hear about it. (Before you ask, i checked the pacman-mirrors before updating as i always do, 8 with status OK)
But now to the actual topic of restoring my system and the actual questions.
For the background, I had kernel 6.11 and 6.6 on the system, but recently switched to kernel 6.6 and also did the system update with it. I don’t know whether this could be the cause of the problem or not.
I also checked my boot directory of my active root partition and everything is still there except the two required images, so I can’t boot with one or the other kernel.
I know there are already some sites that describe the chrooting process in detail to get the system back up and running. Nevertheless, I am addressing you with a special question due to my special situation.I have made a backup of my root partition (with /boot) at regular intervals and there is the required file initframs-6.6-x86_64.image and the iamge file of my other kernel, which was still the 6.10 and not the 6.11 kernel.
Now my question, can I simply restore this file, as I have access to a kind of emergency mode when booting via my backup SDD.
Nope, never experiences a false ‘finish’ or a hung update.
How did you perform it? What command(s)?
I suppose. Maybe. But it would be out of sync with the rest of your system, modules for example, so you would still need to perform a sync/upgrade. Whether this would be functional from booting the system as-is or from a chroot entirely depends on that comparison of those initram images vs system.
On the final point - pamac is already rather poor at properly prompting the user. If all output was redirected elsewhere then this may have been compounded.
And your command would include AUR packages … meaning you were likely trying to build/upgrade deprecated packages (that were dropped from the repos but still have an identically named package in the AUR, or that are caused by another foreign dependency, etc).
I did never activate the AUR in my pamac, i update AUR seperatly with yay or paru.
I have one question about the chrooting, does the image have to be up to date or can I use an old one?
OK, i see, a relativeley new one would be recommended, must ist be a full image oder can i use minimal ?
There are several good reasons why an update should be supervised. You have now found out one of them.
My recommendations for the update:
Read the update thread
Update with pacman or trizen
In a terminal window or in the console (depending on the information in the update thread)
Pacman does not do AUR-Updates
trizen always does the standard update first and then asks for the AUR packages individually
Personally, I run “maxi” after every update. This shows me whether everything is there so that my system will boot again afterwards. (kernel, initrd, modules …)
Any Linux ISO will do - Manjaro ISO’s have the tool “manjaro-chroot” on them that helps you with chrooting into your system.
Age doesn’t matter, version doesn’t matter - as long as you can successfully boot it to use the tool.
If you still have the kernel(s) but no initrd
which is what seems to be the case
then you should get the system back up and working by using pacman to install a kernel
perhaps only the recreation of the initrd’s would be enough.
chroot using the tool manjaro-chroot - look up how to use it
once in: pacman-mirrors -f (to refresh pacman’s list of mirrors) pacman -Syu linux66 (to install this or any other available kernel version - and update the system while at it) mkinitcpio -P (generate initrd’s for all installed kernels) grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg (to regenerate the boot loader configuration)
exit
to exit chroot
then reboot
Did you have a look into that - to maybe see what happened?
regardless:
if ls -al /boot/
doesn’t list any initrd’s
the above should remedy that situation
For future reference, you’d have been better off using pamac update | tee ~/Dokumente/_Terminal/69upd.txt
That way you’d see the output as it ran rather than needing to view the file afterwards. Better still, make sure any STDERR messages are also saved in the file with pamac update 2>&1 | tee ~/Dokumente/_Terminal/69upd.txt
@Handspuehler as well:
There is also a command which should be ideal for that kind of task: script
with tee and redirection some things might not end up in the file
with script, everything is recorded.
cave:
user input as well - including passwords
so this transcript is for your eyes only …
That one passed me by. And a quick test shows that it also puts debug output from Perl scripts in the log file, something I’ve never been able to do before, so that’s going to be very useful.
Thanks.
OK, I found the time to take care of my Linux and followed the instructions given by Nachlese and all is well again for now.
So my Manjaro is booting again and has been updated. First of all, thanks to cscs, who reacted quickly and put me on the right path.
Because of the tee-idea from beermad, I have to admit that I always have a second tty (tty4), where I also get a live output of the system update with the tail command. The possibility of having everything in one command and tty with tee is new to me and I like it as soon as it works. I’ll try it next time, thanks for that too.
I’m also curious about the script command to see if it works and wonder how it should be formulated for my particular case.
