Re: another 9.2 upgrade problem: the answer

The key was the thought that maybe the original mount -w / had failed, but /usr was
mounted rw.

So a whole slew of symlinks had been made in /usr/lib referring ultimately to real files
in /lib, but the symlink chains were broken.  tar attempted to load /usr/lib/libc.so.12
and /usr/lib/liblzma.so.2, and couldn't.  Reconnecting the libc.so.12 chain and making
liblzma.so.2 point to liblzma.so.1.1 allowed tar to work for a complete unpacking of
base.tar.xz, after which I was able to unpack the rest without difficulty.

The machine was fresh out of the packing when I installed 8.0_RC1 on it on my office desk
before we moved it to the data centre.  As I recall, 8.0_RC1 was needed rather urgently
because of driver requirements on the new machines.  Also note that I had no network
access while the problem persisted.

/rescue was of no use because its copy of tar had the same dependencies.  Wouldn't it be
better if basic utilities in /rescue were statically linked?  And why link to /usr/lib
symlinks rather than to /lib anyway?

Thanks to all who spent tie thinking about the problem.

-- 
Steve Blinkhorn <[email protected]>