[solved]udev boot error - usb keyboard wont work in recovery shell

Question

i just hooked up an external drive for the first time to this system, i didnt do anything to it yet, except i went to run gdisk and realized it wasnt installed yet.  So i ran
pacman -Syu gdisk
from an SSh terminal, then when it was updating a package, cant exactly remember which one but i hitnk it was either kernel or udev, the ssh termilal appeared to disconnect becuause it lost its output.
then i opened another terminal sshed in, and was able to run pacman -Syu again, which means the first update did finish, or the lockfile wouldnt have let me update a 2nd time i would think.  (note, the newly external hard drive was connected during all these events).  Something wierd happened here.It had files that needed updating, which i thought that would be rare since i just updated, unless it simply didnt finish, and the lockfile wasnt in place or something, then it finished updating successfully, and i was still remoted into a working SSH command line (i.e. didnt get kicked out this time).
Now is where the fun begins.  i typed 'reboot', and the system appeared to reboot, but i wasnt able to shell in this time.  i connected the monitor to the system almost a minute later, and realized it was still shutting down, then when it rebooted i get an error message.
running early hook [udev]
Warning lib/modules/3.12.8-1-ARCH/modules.devname not found - ignoring
runnign hook [udev]
tiggering events
Waiting 10 seconds for device /dev/sda2
ERROR: device /dev/sda2 not found Skipping fsck
Error unable to find root device /dev/sda2
your being dropped to recovery shell
[rootfs /]#
NOW THE KEYBOARD DOESNT WORK, it only works in bios.  It stops functioning (the numlock light)  as soon as udev starts to initiate, which leaves me with no way to try to reupdate udev and the kernel again to see if i can fix it.
all i could think of was to disconnect the external drive, that didnt help.  then i tried checking the USB settings in bios for any legacy options, it doesnt have them (Dell Optiplex), so i just made sure the USB boot was off and all ports enabled.
Now im totally stuck short of a recovery disk. 
any suggestions how i can just get the keyboard working and chroot into arch and update some package to fix it without having to jump through hoops to make a recovery disk while here at work with limited resources?
Last edited by wolfdogg (2014-01-22 22:53:02)

Answer 1

ok i found what happened, so far. 
looking in /var/log/pacman.log i see a gap in the installs, a 2 minute gap, which is the time i rebooted and reran the install.
at 9:25..  i was running an upgrade, and the last one in the minute of 9:25 is
9:25[PACMAN] upgraded linux-firmware (20131013.7d0c7a8-1 -> 20131230.52d77db-1)
this is where the shell got disconnected therefore i wasnt able to see what happened after this. 
the the log continues at 9:27 minute, has to be when i rebooted and shelled back in and reran the upgrade, the log starts with
9:27[PACMAN] upgraded linux (3.12.6-1 -> 3.12.8-1)
so it appears that the shell got disconnected as it was upgrading linux-firmware (20131013.7d0c7a8-1 -> 20131230.52d77db-1)  .
This begs the questions; Did the SSH shell get disconnected simply because the system was using those resources at the time?  i assume this.  the next question is, was it wrong to be upgrading via remote SSH shell then?  Or whats likely that happened here?
Last edited by wolfdogg (2014-01-22 22:20:04)