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Archlinux not startup after update

Posted on December 21, 2017

I update my droplet with pacman -Syu and rebooted it. The droplet not startup. I connected via web console and I see errors:

systemd[99]: Failed to open serialization file: Read-only file system
systemd[1]: Failed to fully start up daemon: RemoteI/O error
[!!!!!!] Failed to start up manager, freezing.
systemd[1]: Freezing execution.

(see screenshot)

I ran fsck via the recovery but I not found error. The disk seen fine but the droplet not start up. please, help me.



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Arch Linux is not supported by DigitalOcean as a droplet distribution anymore. I doubt you’ll get much help with this.

If you’re using “DigitalOcean Debian to Arch” on the droplet then ask for advice through the issues page perhaps.

hey there, i had got the same issue as op however luckily, after hours and hours experimenting… i finally got my arch up and running now.

for some reason after upgrading the system, the systemd just can’t mount the /dev/vda1 correctly with write access.

so what i did is a bit hacky:

  1. shutdown your droplet
  2. boot from recovery iso, you can select this from recovery menu
  3. start your droplet and open console
  4. select 1 from menu to mount the disk
  5. select 5 to chroot into your arch
  6. move original /sbin/init, rename it as init.real: mv /sbin/init /sbin/init.real
  7. create your own “init” to mount the disk correctly, don’t forget to chmod +x it, here is the script:
#!/bin/sh

mount -o remount,rw /dev/vda1 /
exec init.real

at last shutdown your droplet and turn of recovery mode, and reboot it

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