While trying to move my computer to Debian, after allowing the installer to do it’s task, my machine will not boot.
Instead, I get a long string of text, as follows:
Could not retrieve perf counters (-19)
ACPI Warning: SystemIO range 0x00000000000000B00-0x0000000000000B08 conflicts withOpRegion 0x0000000000000B00-0x0000000000000B0F (\GSA1.SMBI) /20250404/utaddress-204)
usb: port power management may beunreliable
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page found
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
amdgpu 0000:08:00.0 amdgpu: [drm] Failed to setup vendor infoframe on connector HDMI-A-1: -22
And the system eventually collapses into a shell, that I do not know how to use. It returns:
Gave up waiting for root file system device. Common problems:
- Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
- Check rootdelay= (did the system wait lomg enough?)
- Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
Alert! /dev/sdb2 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!
The system has two disks mounted:
– an SSD, with the EFI, root, var, tmp and swap partition, for speeding up the overall system – an hdd, for /home
I had the system running on Mint until recently, so I know the system is sound, unless the SSD stopped working but then it is reasonable to expect it would no accept partitioning. Under Debian, it booted once and then stopped booting all together.
The installation I made was from a daily image, as I am/was aiming to put my machine on the testing branch, in order to have some sort of a rolling distro.
If anyone can offer some advice, it would be very much appreciated.
Nothing that uses apt is remotely bullet-proof. It has gotten better but it is hardly difficult to break.
pacman is hard to break. APK 3 is even harder. The new moss package manager is designed to be hard to break but time will tell. APK is the best at the moment IMHO. In my view, apt is one of the most fragile.
Eh, I disagree with you on Pacman. It could be possible I was doing something stupid, but I’ve had Arch VMs where I didn’t open them for three months, and when I tried to update them I got a colossally messed up install.
I just made a new VM, as I really only need it when I need to make sure a package has the correct dependencies on Arch.
I can almost guarantee that the problem you encountered was an outdated archlinux-keyring that meant you did not have the GPG keys to validate the packages you were trying to install. It is an annoying problem that happens way too often on Arch. Things are not actually screwed up but it really looks that way if you do not know what you are looking at. One line fix if you know what to do.
It was my biggest gripe when I used Arch. I did not run into it much as I updated often but it always struck me as a really major flaw.
I feel like it was more than the package manager whining; I think xorg literally wouldn’t start after the update, although it’s been so long now that I could be misremembering.
Honestly, I probably could have salvaged the install if I’d wanted to without too much difficulty, but it was just a VM for testing distro packaging rather than a daily driver device.
Still, what you say is good to know, and perhaps I should hold back on the Pacman slander. I’ve just been using Debian for around 4 years now and had pretty good reliability; then again, Debian (and most distros, with their pitiful documentation) would probably be very hard to use without Archwiki.