2025-08-21 Initramfs
====================

I just had a little system administration nightmare. It all started
yesterday when I decided that I wasn't going to move the MNT Pocket
Reform to Debian stable (Trixie) after all. I had changed the apt
sources a while ago, pointing them at Trixie and yesterday I had them
point back at unstable.

This is what I had:

    > cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.sources
    # Modernized from /etc/apt/sources.list
    Types: deb
    URIs: http://deb.debian.org/debian/
    Suites: unstable
    Components: main contrib non-free
    Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg

And of course:

    > cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mntre.sources 
    Types: deb
    URIs: https://mntre.com/reform-debian-repo
    Suites: reform
    Components: main
    Architectures: arm64
    Trusted: yes

Then I did and sudo apt update and somewhere after that my problems
started. There was a critical bug in systemd so held it using sudo
apt-mark hold systemd. I tried sudo apt upgrade and I guess
something didn't work (something about Linux kernels?) and there was
something about uninstalling udev. The history shows I did sudo apt
install udev to recover and that there was a systemd circular
dependency because I did sudo apt-mark unhold systemd, then sudo apt
--fix-broken install and sudo apt full-upgrade.

All good? Maybe not.

Today I tried to boot and got dropped into busybox on the initramfs.
It said it couldn't determine the type of the root device. And indeed,
ls /root showed nothing.

After a lot of struggling, I finally determined that I had to mount
one of the devices from /dev as /root. After some trial and error I
found that the magical incantation was mount -t ext4 /dev/mmcblk2p2
/root.

Now what?

What appeared to help is chroot /root to switch to the new system. I
got a real shell! I'm a bit unclear on the details. But now I think I
ran update-initramfs -u and then did exit twice. And booted
successfully!

What a nightmare.

The first thing is to write this up, then to update the system and
then to reboot. Let's see how this ends. Wish me luck.

And … it's still broken in the same way. I can get it to boot but
something is still very wrong.

Whatever it was, it seems that installing reform-desktop-minimal
fixed it. It looked like I got a new kernel? I have no idea. (More
info on the community forum.)

#Administration

2025-08-21. Josch noted:

> You only mounted your root file system but you did not mount /boot
> into it. So the initramfs you created here will be stored in the
> /boot directory of your root file system but it will not be stored
> in the filesystem which then gets mounted as /boot.

Makes sense!

I'm not sure why update-initramfs after I had booted didn't work,
though. Perhaps I still needed the correct kernel for all of this to
work? I have no idea and no way to investigate.