Full system update lead to unresponsive terminal

Question

Hi, all.
I performed a full system update with pacman -Syyu on my machine. This machine has not been fully updated for some time, though I updated some packages occasionally. The only warning message I noticed is that "/bin/mountpoint" existed already, and the system didn't allow the update. I remembered I also ran into similar issues before (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=132225), so I adopted the same approach and added  the --force option.  The updating process was quite smooth.
However, after reboot, the system is unresponsive. I could see the login prompt, but the system didn't accept any input from the keyboard, and I could do nothing. The booting message showed the filesystem (RAID1 with LVM) were mounted, but /dev/pts and /dev/shm couldn't be mounted. And it seemed that many binaries in /sbin and /bin couldn't be found. (I think it is due to the merge of /sbin and /bin to /usr/bin.)
I understand you might need more information to offer advise, but the system is effectively frozen, I need to have a responsive shell to provide more information. So this is basically a dead loop now ... Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!

Answer 1

First question: did you force just the util-linux package, or did you actually do `pacman -Syyu --force`.
I think the former would have been a mistake, but the latter would be a major f&*^ up.  It might be useful to know just how wrong this could have gone.
Last edited by Trilby (2012-05-18 17:40:20)