derick.in

Recently I moved to Arch Linux, for horror . It was a good experience, since I needed a less memory hungry OS. Arch is fine using only 60M in console and ~160M in GNOME. I needed to use some emulator which is very processor and memory hungry.

Yesterday, I tried some weird things and modified some configuration files. When I started the PC, I was dropped to recovery shell with ramfs$ prompt. Bad Luck! I searched Google, and found an article which gave me an idea on how to proceed with recovery.

First I created a USB bootable disk with Arch ISO. I started the PC from USB and I was dropped into working shell. Mounted my original partitions in a folder and issued chroot.

mkdir /mnt/oldroot
mkdir /mnt/oldroot/boot
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/oldroot/boot
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/oldroot
chroot /mnt/oldroot


Then I corrected the mistake and rebuilt kernel image.
mkinitcpio -p kernel26

It gave some error, saying that some of the files could not be accessed while processing automount. But it properly generated fallback image. I rebooted the PC, this time without the help of USB and chose Fallback from grub. I issued mkinitcpio command again and  rebooted. My PC is back to the original state.

Edit: Link to original article, Arch Linux Recovery