[arch-dev-public] [help needed] can't boot into my laptop

[Roman Kyrylych]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 10:59, Ronald van Haren <pressh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey guys,
>
> this morning I synced my old i686 laptop to testing, thereby upgrading the
> kernel to 2.6.31 and such. I did so when I was in the train (I downloaded
> the packages already at home) on the way to my internship. I rebooted the
> system after the upgrade, but it won't start anymore.
> It just hangs forever at the line 'waiting for udev uevents to be processed'
> (although one of my tries actually went to checking filesystems before it
> hanged and two times it hanged at 'loading modules').
>
> Problem is I don't have a live cd or anything here and my laptop can't boot
> from usb, but I really need some code and documents which are on my laptop
> right now. I'm kinda lost here, but is there some way to accomplish this or
> at least get into an early shell where I could mount an usb drive?

In the grub menu edit the kernel command line and add "break=y" to it.
You should get to the dash shell of initramfs environment.
I suggest using fallback kernel otherwise you may not get all
filesystems supported.
If your mkinitcpio image does not have usb hook you should be able to
mount USB devices, I think.

-- 
Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)