2012/6/14 Kevin Chadwick <ma1l1ists@yahoo.co.uk>
It reports a problem reading /boot partition saying something about it being not a valid ext2
I see /boot is ext4
There was a time recently when a kernel bug gave invalid warnings about other filesystem types like ext2, ext3 before mounting ext4 so it could be a red herring, is the exact error gone too quick to note.
I presume by Vanilla you mean an arch package?
p.s. If you can edit the kernel commandline you can change the init part to
init=/bin/sh and hitting b to boot
It's limited in what can be done but that way you may be able to troubleshoot some things more quickly by using the built in kernel commands, see if there is a reboot command. If there is it is internal and not from any filesystem. If it works you could then do it again and this time mount your root filesystem and try the reboot command from that.
There are also kernel debug configs like printk but I'm not sure that's the route to go down yet.
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Why not do something good every day and install BOINC. ________________________________________________________
Yeah by vanilla I mean the stock kernel. I dont get what do you mean by: be a red herring, is the exact error gone too quick to note. Well I can chroot as I did to revert to the old kernel so changing grub menu seems harder than chroot. My main problem is that reverting to the old kernel did not work. Maybe I forgot to run mkinitcpio By did not work I mean that I don't get boot. it fails with the message you meantioned to be listed on a bug. I will look for it later but if you could provide me a link I would be gratefull (I'm at work atm). Also I own you a post of the exact error message on boot over the new kernel. A thing I dont understand is what if the difference of doing a magic reboot: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/rebooting-magic-way and calling a shutdown lies mainly on the umounting of the file systems if this is the case I should be able to reboot after a umount -f all right? I wonder if a -l would be better: -l Lazy unmount. Detach the filesystem from the filesystem hierarchy now, and cleanup all references to the filesystem as soon as it is not busy anymore. (Requires kernel 2.4.11 or later.) I could not run fsck on /boot as it reported to be mounted. Should I maybe run a normal shutdown -h now in parallel with http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/sysrq.txt to check which tasks are still stuck right?