Kernel panic during update, arch-chroot gets bash: Permission denied

[N2CSM]

Hey everyone, I seem to be having the problem mentioned in this thread (and also this one)

I was very hopeful that I could replicate the steps mentioned, especially in the first one, however I can’t run anything, as I constantly get bash: ./pacman-static: Permission denied

Scouring the internet, I couldn’t find anything that can let me run commands both inside the chroot and outside (as shown in the Arch Wiki).

The only thing I can think of is that I’ve mounted things incorrectly somehow or maybe there’s something different about NVME drives (mine are /dev/nvme0n1 when I install via Calamares). They’re not set to noexec though!

Any tips appreciated!

[lew]

Hi there,

bash: ./pacman-static: Permission denied

looks like your user doesn’t have execute permission on pacman-static.

[N2CSM]

Heya,

As in I need to chmod pacman-static?

[dalto]

Yes, chmod a+x pacman-static

[lew]

That’d be my guess, but better to look before you leap

[N2CSM]

Alright, that did the trick. Maybe because it’s chroot and I started to overthink it instead of going for the obvious.

I’ll continue down the errors and if everything goes to plan, will update the thread with this solution

I also chmod -R 777nd while in / instead of ~ , but that’s a problem for future me

[dalto]

@N2CSM

I also chmod -R 777nd while in / instead of ~

You might want to write it off as a loss and reinstall. That is very difficult to fix in a safe way. Even if you reinstall all your packages, that will still leave a ton of manual cleanup to do.

That is a much worse problem than your update failure.

[lew]

@N2CSM

chmod -R 777nd while in /

That’s rough! If you find a good way to fix this that would be interesting. But your best course of action is probably to copy all your data off the system and start over.

[N2CSM]

tl;dr

I will backup data and re-install, but not because this is unfixable. Thanks @lew and @dalto for helping out - chmod on a single file or directory was the right answer here, the rest is addressing corrupted packages as it is in the other threads.

For anyone that ends up here in the future: Remember to be careful with root privileges, kids!

/tl;dr

Now, for the curious - I started fixing things one by one, but I think I have even more corrupted packages than @ArchMonkey from the other thread. That, along with my stupid mistake of chmoding my root directory to 777, made it a bit too much effort for a machine that I’ll be leaving behind very soon. Should this have been a computer I’d be using often or as a main one, I would have persisted, but sadly it is not.

It would have been a very interesting exercise to fix both the corrupted packages and the 777 issue, so I’m not too happy I’m leaving those behind unsolved, but you have to consider time and effort always. I hope this kernel panic while updating isn’t too wide-spread either. Not everyone is comfortable with chrooting and as we saw, even if you are, you can make a mess of it

I say sadly, because this is my longest running Endeavour install on physical hardware and I’ll be sad to see it go. I think it’s around 3 years old and the only problem I’ve had with it was actually with GRUB, not the install itself. In fact, the recent move to Wayland and Plasma 6 improved the over-heating problems of the hardware with no action from myself, apart from running the update (HP Z book, awful, especially at their price range)

But this is a business machine and they’re making me switch off of it, so even if I fix this, I’ll gain no more than a few weeks with it at best. (My new options are Ubuntu, Windows 10 or Mac, which is my lowlight of 2024… for now - all three are at a similar level of bloat and annoy me greatly - sorry for venting)

I say all this to say thank you, it’s been great and I’ll continue to use Endeavour as my main Arch-based distro, just not on this particular machine any more. Great distro, great community from the start (I think I have one Virtualbox machine with the original XFCE flavour of Endeavour still running), great purple aesthetic and wallpapers .