Computer won't get past Grub after upgrade

25 May 2024, 14:07:38

A couple of days ago I did a pacman upgrade on my laptop which installed 6.9.1-artix1-1.

Since that time I have been unable to get the system to boot either to the main system, fallback initramfs, or recovery mode.

On getting past the GRUB screen I get an error loading the initial ramdisk. 'you need to load the kernel first'

I'm now looking at the system using an Arch live USB.

In /usr/lib/modules I can see 6.9.1-artix1-1 and 6.5.5-artix1-1 as well as some others predating 6.5.5

When I run mkinitcpio -p linux as arch-chroot on the system it produces an error after trying to create zstd-compressed initcpio images for both /boot/initramfs-linux.img and initramfs-linux-fallback.img

bsdtar: error while loading shared libraries: libicuuc.so.75: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.

For the initramfs-linux the error states: Early uncompressed CPIO image generation FAILED: 'bsdtar (step 1)' reported an error.

For the fallback it's: Early uncompressed CPIO image generation FAILED: 'sort' reported an error.

I'm operating at the limit of my Linux skillset here and could do with some guidance as to how to fix this and restore my system.

I'm guessing I need to supply the required libicuuc.so.75 file and re-run mkinitcpio but don't want to take that step without asking more advice as I don't want to make things worse.

Update: ldconfig -p | grep libicuuc shows:

libicuuc.so.75 (libc6) => /usr/lib32/libicuuc.so.75
libicuuc.so.74 (libc6,x86-64) =>
/usr/lib/libicuuc.so.74

TIA

Re: Computer won't get past Grub after upgrade

Reply #1 – 25 May 2024, 15:59:34

Fixed.

Mounted the system from an Artix Live USB and ran pacman -r /mnt -Syu

Then re-ran mkinitcpio as above without errors and re-booted into my old system.

Hope this may help someone else