libmpfr not found, botched update, corrupted boot ... fubar

21 January 2018, 12:05:35

Hi,

After my last issue I decided to leave the -lts kernel and use the dkms for my drivers (r8168, nvidia, ...)
The update process looked fine until some script started to throw syntax errors and that some part (awk? perl? It was yestereday and it was a long one) complained about missing a missing libmpfr library. It still finished its update (instead of dropping dead on the spot), as if the errors were irrelevant (which I find a bit cavalier) so I tried to have an update without any complain from whatever pacman was running.

It looks like said library was updated to its next version with did not agree with the update. I suspect this is when my system was corrupted, but I digress.
I rolled back the update of that lib, blocked it, did the update again and it looked "ok".

Reboot, naturally, and to my surprise, grub was still looking at the old kernels AND complaining it could not find the UUIDs for the paritions. No effort editing the boot scripts in grub helped me go further than an emergency shell where none of my keyboards (I've tried 5 of them) was recognized.

I made a rescue disk that allowed me to mount my root and boot partitions, and a with some fiddling, to have a (temporary) working system where I used pacman to specifically re-install the kernel, update grub, ... (The disks were still there, their UUID did not change ...)

I tried several combinations of update/rollback/... re-ran the grub installation several times but it never was able to recover.

I've spent the best part of my Saturday on this. I finally called it: time of death 22:17.

I suspect the failing scripts did corrupt something that was never restored/detected.

Since 1993, my main computer ran Slackware, Red-Hat, Suse, Debian, XUbuntu, LFS, Gentoo, Arch, Manjaro-OpenRC and up to yesterday Artix. So far Red-Hat and Artix are the only ones that went belly up but the RH one was way worse. The other changes were just following updates in my mentality. I knew the distribution was young so this calculated risk is all on me.

In parallel with Artix, I've been testing several other alternatives over the last few months and one of them already made it for "professional" work so installing it here too only took the better part of an hour (restoring the terabytes of data included).

I want to thank you for your effort in providing an Arch distribution free from that systemd infection. I know these newborn issue will be hammered out sooner or later and wish you all the best.

E.

Re: libmpfr not found, botched update, corrupted boot ... fubar

Reply #1 – 21 January 2018, 13:02:21

"libmpfr" is provided by the package "mpfr". The best course of action, when an update like this fails, is to do "sudo pacman Rdd mpfr" this will uninstall the offending/corrupt package and should allow the update a clean path to install the updated "mpfr" package.

Re: libmpfr not found, botched update, corrupted boot ... fubar

Reply #2 – 21 January 2018, 16:08:33

Quote

I rolled back the update of that lib, blocked it, did the update again and it looked "ok".