[SOLVED] Borked my Arch! Hanging at boot...

Question

Hi, I've been using Arch on my netbook for the last couple of months with great results until just now....
Yesterday everything was going great guns, then I booted a different distro (remixOS) from a persistant usb install. After a few hours I rebooted Arch but it hung shortly after entering init runlevel 3, whilst trying to start the laptop-mode daemon. I read about a laptop-mode related bug that prevented users from booting and, believing that laptop-mode was the culprit, booted into a Linux Mint live session and edited my rc.conf daemons array.
However this has not solved the problem, my machine now just hangs at "Starting crond daemon" with a [BUSY] message on the right hand side of the screen and the cursor frozen.
What should I do? I use this machine for school and I don't want to reinstall, I'd prefer to learn about the issue and fix the problem myself.
Sorry if this is the wrong place for this thread, I've searched extensively but haven't found anything that matches my problem and other threads about chrooting and init runlevels are too loaded with jargon for me to comprehend at this point.
Thanks for reading about my problems.
Toby.
Last edited by TobyJamesJoy (2012-07-28 04:16:39)

Answer 1

TobyJamesJoy wrote:
Haha, mkinitpcio -p linux worked! Posting from Arch! Thanks so much Zancarius!
I have tried to pacman -Syu but i have a dependancy cycle with lib32-gcc-libs and gcc-libs-multilib but that's most likely covered in another thread.
Well, my mind's a bit boggled. Sounds like it might've been from an update or simple oversight. I've had issues with mkinitcpio not generating the correct initrd--once from my own mistake (not updating mkinitcpio.conf correctly) and once from it running but apparently not including LVM even though I instructed it to. (I suspect the latter might've also been from an oversight on my part.)
Here's a thread that might help with the lib32-gcc-libs/gcc-libs-multilib issue.
TobyJamesJoy wrote:I did get some colourful error messages in my boot too so here's my /etc/fstab:
Assuming your UUIDs are correct, your fstab looks fine. The only change that you might need is to set the pass field (last number) for /boot and /home to 2 (see fstab(5)), but that wouldn't cause your problems.
Unless the kernel is screaming at you, you may occasionally see some things on boot that happen to be harmless. No biggy. :)
TobyJamesJoy wrote:
And a link to my /boot/grub/menu.lst which was indeed installed from arch.
I know that there is a quiet flag in my kernel options because I noticed it when I was experimenting with switching the runlevels via grub but I'm not certain where to find my kernel line, nor what constitutes "unsusual options". I'm pretty sure I didn't change anything for ACPI support but maybe some laptop-mode-tools stuff did someting, I can't be sure...
The boot looks fine, especially since mkinitcpio fixed your problem. "Unusual options" in this case would be things like turning off various kernel features or passing in options to change behavior--you'd know them if you saw them. You don't have them, so it's nothing to worry about.
Good to know that solved your problem. Don't forget to mark your thread [solved] too!
Edit: Whoops! I think you caught the [solved] before I did. Sorry! :)
Last edited by Zancarius (2012-07-28 04:37:16)