Really big issue after last upgrade

Question

After invoking
pacman -Syu
this morning something really strange happened : it upgraded my kernel headers and docs to kernel 2.6.35.7, but did nothing to the kernel itself. After the install of all packages, I went to the '/boot' directory and it was empty except for the 'grub' sub-directory. Since the kernel was still loaded in memory, it was only a matter of doing
pacman -S kernel26
and it installed the kernel and initramfs image.  All this happened while I rebooted in console mode to uninstall gtk/gnome completely and install kde.
  After that I went to check my system configuration file 'rc.conf' and guess what, it was missing too and after that I noticed that 'inittab' had also been deleted. Luckly I edited both files with vim which made backups in 'rc.conf~' and 'inittab~' respectively, so it was easy to restore both. After having a quick look at etc I decided to reboot the system(default runlevel was changed back to 5 so I could boot kde directly) but something was strange after reboot(I expected that) : nouveau framebuffer driver did not load and I never entered KDM, getting a terminal login instead. Also noticed that the PS1 variable was not set. After trying to edit my configuration files I kept getting that this was a read only file system and could do nothing until I booted with an old ubuntu livecd. After checking on 'inittab' again I noticed the following files were missing(sadly, I never edited them):
- /etc/rc.sysinit
- /etc/rc.single
- /etc/rc.multi
- /etc/rc.shutdown
  Has anyone experienced this 'accident' before? If so, do you have any clue how I might recover those files? I would rather not reinstall the system.
  Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

jonathan183 wrote:
thiago wrote:
After checking on 'inittab' again I noticed the following files were missing(sadly, I never edited them):
- /etc/rc.sysinit
- /etc/rc.single
- /etc/rc.multi
- /etc/rc.shutdown
  Has anyone experienced this 'accident' before? If so, do you have any clue how I might recover those files? I would rather not reinstall the system
pacman -Qo /etc/rc.sysinit reports owned by package initscripts ... which you could re-install ... might be worth reviewing logs and see if you can figure out whats going on first though ...
  Thanks, after manually installing the 'initscripts' package in '/var/cache/pacman/pkg', my system was restored. As for what happened, I believe it was some bug with pacman, as the 'initscripts' package was uninstalled after the system upgrade. That package was part of the 'base' meta package which was upgraded as a whole. After the restore I issued :
pacman -Sf initscripts
to have the package 'officially installed'.
  As I stated, 'initscripts' was not the only package uninstalled after the system upgrade, kernel26 was lost too(but kernel26-docs and kernel26-headers were upgraded successfully). After the restore I tried to start kde with 'startx' and got a message stating that '/usr/bin/X' could not be found/executed. That was solved by reinstalling the 'xorg' meta package, but I believe some package of the 'xorg' group was also uninstalled after the upgrade.