Re: System broken after full-upgrade: please help!

[Rodolfo Medina <rodolfo.medina@gmail.com>]

Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> writes:

> Gary Dale wrote:
>> Rodolfo Medina wrote:
>> >My Debian Sid box won't restart after today's full-upgrade.  At booting, I
>> >read
>
> Sid is the unstable child...
>
>> To get back into your system, you can try booting from a Linux CD (system
>> rescue CD, for example) and trying to debug from there. For example, you
>> could try (assuming your Linux drive is /dev/sda1):
>> 
>> mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
>> mount -o loop /dev /mnt/dev
>> mount -o loop /sys /mnt/sys
>> mount -o loop /proc /mnt/proc
>> chroot /mnt bash
>
> I also recommend the debian-installer in rescue mode.  The above will
> work fine.  Or you could use the debian-installer in rescue mode to
> guide you through this.
>
> Here is the official documentation for it:
>
>   http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch08s07.html.en
>
> But that is fairly terse.  Let me say that the rescue mode looks just
> like the install mode initially.  It will ask you keyboard and locale
> questions and you might wonder if you are rescuing or installing!  But
> it will have "Rescue" in the corners so that you can tell and be
> assured.  Get the tool set up with keyboard, locale, timezone, and
> similar and eventually it will give you a menu with a list of actions.
>
>   Advanced options...
>   Rescue mode
>   keyboard
>   ...starts networking...
>   hostname
>   domainname
>   ...apt update release files...
>   ...loading additional components, Retrieving udebs...
>   ...detecting disks...
>
> Then eventually it will get to a menu "Enter rescue mode" that will
> ask what device to use as a root file system.  It will list the
> partitions that it has automatically detected.  (If you have raid or
> lvm then it will list options for those.  If not then just the simple
> disks.)  Select the appropriate partition from the list.  Then
> continue.  At that point it presents a menu "Execute a shell in
> /dev/...".  That is what you want.  That should get you a shell on
> your system with everything needed mounted.
>
> Bob

As suggested, I used the debian-installer in rescue mode and asked it to
`Execute a shell in /dev/sda7', which is my Sid box.  From that shell, I gave
those commands suggested, but it said:

 # /dev: Is a directory

and similarly for /sys and /proc.  Then, when I typed `chroot /mnt bash', it
said:

 chroot: failed to run command `bash': No such file or directory.

Anyway, /dev/sda7 is there correctly mounted, and I can see it from /mnt.  What
now?

Thanks,

Rodolfo