Trying to recover a badly trashed devuan system
by davcefai from LinuxQuestions.org on (#6K2RX)
A short while back, while upgrading my Devuan Ceres PC I heard a "click" and the system died.
PSU is Ok and I replaced the motherboard. This was a Gigabyte B450M and I decided to go for the B550M - a more recent one with a newer chipset.
I had some difficulties in getting it to boot. It turns out that the ATX plug was very stiff and it seems that one or more pins were not making contact I sorted this out by lightly rubbing the plug with a candle. It then slid in easily and the system came to life. (I report this in case it helps anybody else - I doubt that it was related to my problem)
I have 3 variants of kernel 6.6 and one of 6.5 installed. All three 6.6 panic:
Code:VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown block (0,0)the 6.5 will boot - with some complaints - . I get a "pstore is not supported" message and complaints about firmware.
I have no idea what pstore is nor where it came from.
I only have one initrd image:
Code:initrd.img-6.5.0-5-amd64but have the vmlinuz and config files for the other kernels.
The firmware errors may not be surprising, after all it is upgraded and not yet installed firmware.
When the system finally gets through to multiuser mode i am presented with a login screen I have never seen before (slim?) but the keyboard and mouse do not work.
If in single user (recovery) mode I log in as me and then run startx the same thing happens.
When the login screen is displayed I can connect to the PC using putty from another machine
The only way forward I can see is to run a dist-upgrade. How dangerous can this be? Can I completely lose the system?
Would update initramfs work?
Suggestions or miracle fixes will be very welcome.
PSU is Ok and I replaced the motherboard. This was a Gigabyte B450M and I decided to go for the B550M - a more recent one with a newer chipset.
I had some difficulties in getting it to boot. It turns out that the ATX plug was very stiff and it seems that one or more pins were not making contact I sorted this out by lightly rubbing the plug with a candle. It then slid in easily and the system came to life. (I report this in case it helps anybody else - I doubt that it was related to my problem)
I have 3 variants of kernel 6.6 and one of 6.5 installed. All three 6.6 panic:
Code:VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown block (0,0)the 6.5 will boot - with some complaints - . I get a "pstore is not supported" message and complaints about firmware.
I have no idea what pstore is nor where it came from.
I only have one initrd image:
Code:initrd.img-6.5.0-5-amd64but have the vmlinuz and config files for the other kernels.
The firmware errors may not be surprising, after all it is upgraded and not yet installed firmware.
When the system finally gets through to multiuser mode i am presented with a login screen I have never seen before (slim?) but the keyboard and mouse do not work.
If in single user (recovery) mode I log in as me and then run startx the same thing happens.
When the login screen is displayed I can connect to the PC using putty from another machine
The only way forward I can see is to run a dist-upgrade. How dangerous can this be? Can I completely lose the system?
Would update initramfs work?
Suggestions or miracle fixes will be very welcome.