Broken System after recent upgrade

Question

Something went disasterously  wrong during a recent upgrade, and my EeePC no longer recongnises the kernel!
I have managed to boot from a PartedMagic rescue USB, and am trying to re-install the kernel from the pacman cache.
This is failing with the messages:
error: database path is undefined
error: failed to init transaction (unable to lock database)
if you're sure a package manager is not already running, you can remove (null)
I haven't got a clue what to do now, and I'm desperate for some help! PLEASE!
**edit** I solved the database path error - I had not mounted the drive containing /var.  The other errors remain.
Last edited by myrlin (2011-12-08 20:31:25)

Answer 1

Symlinks:
My laptop is an eeepc 901, with a 4Gb fixed SSD (sda), and a 16GB removable one (sdb). When I set it up, due to lack of experience and/or knowledge, I did the following to try to reduce wear on the 4GB drive, and to use space more efficiently. I probably should not have done things this way, but it has worked perfectly for several years and so I took the approach of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
I created a /boot and a / partition on 4Gb SSD, and installed to that, then moved /home, /var, and /tmp to the 16Gb SSD, and replaced them with symlinks on the 4Gb SSD.
I subsequently did various tweaks suggested on the EeePC forum to further reduce read/write cycles, which can be seen from my fstab.
Here is my fstab:
# /etc/fstab: static file system information
# <file system> <dir> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
devpts /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0
shm /dev/shm tmpfs nodev,nosuid 0 0
#/dev/cdrom /media/cd auto ro,user,noauto,unhide 0 0
#/dev/dvd /media/dvd auto ro,user,noauto,unhide 0 0
#/dev/fd0 /media/fl auto user,noauto 0 0
/dev/sda1 /boot ext4 defaults 0 1
/dev/sda2 / ext4 defaults 0 1
/dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1 ext4 noatime,journal_async_commit,data=writeback,barrier=0,nobh,commit=60,errors=remount-ro 0 1
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/lock tmpfs defaults,size=10M,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/run tmpfs defaults,size=10M,mode=0755 0 0
none /var/log tmpfs defaults,size=20M 0 0
/var/lib/pacman contains 2 folders, local and sync. Please let me know if I should post the contents. It did have db.lck, which I deleted in an attempt to make pacman work, but without success.
Please feel free to say that this is such a mess it would be better to start again anyway