Heylas, So, I ran 6.8 syspatch (patches 002 and 003 together) for three systems today (yesterday by the time anyone sees this, most likely). Two came right back up as expected. The third didn't, but as it's local, I could go retry at the console (all three were actually patched and rebooted via ssh).
It won't start the boot, but displays "No active partition". Checking online, this message seems to indicate a failed upgrade, with the bootloader load incomplete, and (because I was distracted, and running three updates in a state of fatigue), it's actually likely that what I did was to Ctrl-B D out of tmux before it returned from kernel relinking, and then hit doas reboot unthinkingly. Anyway, that's my guess. Is there a straightforward way to install kernel and bootloader without requiring a system reinstall? Can I 'upgrade' with an install cd or usb stick from (broken) 6.8+sp3 to 6.8, and then syspatch it up to date? I'm trying to avoid full reinstall because that seems likely to wipe out existing configuration. I figure my fallback is create install stick/cd (from the other local 6.8, which was successfully updated), boot from that, pull backups of all the configuration so I don't have to reconfigure all the services (and double-check sizes and locations of disk slices on the boot drive, and store that somewhere safe, then reinstall and copy stuff back (it's all backed up, in fact, but it's not backed up recently enough for confidence). So ... faster way to fix my screwup, when I've probably borked my kernel and the bootloader, somehow? Or if it is entirely impossible that "No active partition" could be the result of kernel relinking borkage, and it's obvious to someone that something else (hardware failure showing up on a reboot?) happened, I'd welcome clues. Thanks. Amy! -- Amelia A. Lewis amyzing {at} talsever.org Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force. -- Sir Impey Biggs [Dorothy L. Sayers, "Clouds of Witness"]