Can't load shared library, libgpg-error missing?

Question

Right, so this morning I decided to try out Cinnamon. I booted into Arch, logged into GNOME, installed cinnamon from the repositories, and did a system upgrade. I then rebooted. I select Arch Linux from GRUB, everything is working fine, but GDM won't load. And there are some strange error messages I've never seen before on the screen. Hmm. So, apparently, the journal service failed to start:
/dev/sda1: recovering journal
/dev/sda1: clean, 260391/7782400 files, 2855892/31099729 blocks
[ 2.896956] systemd[1]: Failed to start Trigger Flushing of Journal to Persistent Storage.
[ 2.902798] systemd[1]: Failed to start Trigger Flushing of Journal to Persistent Storage.
[ 2.903928] systemd[1]: Failed to start Journal Service.
[ 2.904007] systemd[1]: Dependency failed for Trigger Flushing of Journal to Persistent Storage.
[ 2.904798] systemd[1]: Failed to start Journal Service.
[ 3.092906] microcode: failed to load file amd-ucode/microcode_amd_fam15h.bin
So, I figure I need to do a bit of troubleshooting, and I need to disable GDM, since it doesn't want to start. So I boot into my installation media, arch-chroot into my newly mounted partition, and try to disable GDM with systemctl disable gdm.service. Well, apparently, systemctl is having trouble loading a shared library, because it then spits out this error message:
systemctl: error while loading shared libraries: /usr/lib/libgpg-error.so.0: file too short
So, I think perhaps that a library has magically gone missing and I try to reinstall it, but to no avail:
pacman -Sv libgpg
pacman: error while loading shared libraries: /usr/lib/libgpg-error.so.0: file too short
I'm very confused at this point, I haven't the slightest idea what I did. Sorry about the lack of logs, I haven't found anything about this from Google or these forums. I have no idea what logs would be relevant here, as I have no idea what's going on. Any help, or suggestions on which logs may be relevant, would be highly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

oops.  Two follow ups, first it seems you got that before my edit to at the -l flag to the second ls, I was curious if you still had the package in your cache, whether it was the right version, and whether it was the right size (poor man's checksum (1)).  It's there, and it's the right version, but I'm curious on the size too.
The second follow up was that I hadn't accounted for the symlink, so the second command should really be as follows
ls -l /usr/lib/libpgp-error.so.0.10.0
as pacman says it's too short, I'm curious *how* short.  Is it an empty file, or does it look like the right size which would indicate other corruption, or is it just short.
EDIT (1):  I suppose while were at it we may as well get a real checksum.  Here's mine on the package cache file, yours *should* match
$ md5sum /var/cache/pacman/pkg/libgpg-error-1.12-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz
602a18784e9916e1a4d13b10de6074aa /var/cache/pacman/pkg/libgpg-error-1.12-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz
If yours matches that, the cause of this problem may remain a mystery, but the solution could be to reinstall that package.  I suspect this will be the solution regardless though.  And if you have a live media it might be easiest to just use pacman from the live system with your system as a target, and reinstall libgpg-error.  If you don't have a live media, then you *might* have to uncompress the package manually.
Last edited by Trilby (2013-07-08 19:19:52)