[SOLVED] After latest upgrad. Boots to grub prompt

Question

Hi,
I just upgraded my Thinkpad T61 following
https://www.archlinux.org/news/binaries … ervention/
After completeing the upgrade I got an error "Unable to start shell:/bin/bash" in Terminator. I commented out /dev/pts in /etc/fstab following
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=169076
the problem did not go away. I decided to reboot After which the computer boots only to a grub prompt.
I'm posting this after booting with a linuxmint USB stick so Ihave access to the / partition on the laptop.
I've been on systemd for a while now. However I now suspect that I was not fully migrated to systemd. I did do a pacman -R initscripts during the latest upgrade.
Does anybody know how I can recover from this?
need all the help I can get on this one!
Last edited by emk (2013-09-02 03:22:05)

Answer 1

Trilby, you are correct the empty /boot was because I neglected to mount the /boot partition. My mistake.
2. I did have errors as per https://www.archlinux.org/news/binaries … ervention/ i.e the upgrade failed because /bin /sbin were still in the filesystem. I followed the steps in the link  and found some files that were  holding things up.
I removed the following files
pacman -R gen-init-cpio wlan-ng26-utils consolekit dcron hpoj initscripts tcp_wrappers
I boot via systemd though I suspect now I was not fully migrated.
3. Output of ls on boot partition:
mint e3beb7a9-4c88-4688-8a2d-a00946489a3f # ls -l
total 21258
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Sep 2 00:22 grub
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14869898 Sep 2 00:25 initramfs-linux-fallback.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3010076 Sep 2 00:25 initramfs-linux.img
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 28 Aug 21 2011 kernel26-fallback.img -> initramfs-linux-fallback.img
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 19 Aug 21 2011 kernel26.img -> initramfs-linux.img
drwx------ 2 root root 12288 May 11 2010 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Sep 2 00:28 syslinux
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Aug 21 2011 vmlinuz26 -> vmlinuz-linux
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3783360 Aug 30 09:33 vmlinuz-linux
mint e3beb7a9-4c88-4688-8a2d-a00946489a3f #
4. You are probably right. I have both grub 0.97 and grub 2 in the pacman pkg cache
5. I did follow the steps except that trying to close a terminal once the bash error croped up led to my being logged out before I could run the last two commands 'pacman -S bash and Pacman -Su'
Thanks Trilby. I feel like my Linux chops are evaporating the older I get :0