On their site it's claimed Zenwalk should work all right and even updating from 3 to 4 should work. I even guess it happened (at least xnetpkg changed) before this; however yesterday evening I started an update. Xnetpkg didn't first show any packages to be updated, but after two mirrors it found 88 of them. I should know better but went to update all of those 88 packets, and here's what happened:

- xnetpkg seemed to have done it's job done all right
- all of a sudden I was unable to launch some apps
- I then checked logs, seeing a whole lot of errors..

The logs were telling me, starting right after/even during the update process, that my kernel was way too old (how could it be, updated just some time ago), some executables couldn't be run/bash interpretation errors, ...X was still running of course, and every program that I had launched before the update. But nothing else worked; I could press TAB and have bash show me that all files (like those in /bin and /usr/bin) were there, but I couldn't run them (same errors as above). Of course this affected the getty program too, so logging in became impossible. And since it was late in the evening, I shut the machine down using power button (heh, shutdown didn't run). And as one can guess, it won't boot anymore

I'm not sure if I still have some live-cd gathering dust in some box but I'd just like to know

1) if somebody else has managed to break their Zenwalk this easily
2) what kind of failure during update could produce such errors and freeze the system totally, affecting even the stuff that wasn't updated (this refers to a kernel problem, right?)
3) if there is a handy getaround to fix the problem quickly (I'll try just replacing the kernel using a live-cd of some kind if I'll find one)

If it proves too time-consuming I'll probably just either reinstall Zenwalk 4 cleanly or move on to use XP only for a while, since this is a dual-boot machine..it would be nice to know how to avoid this kind of deathtrap in the future. This is actually the first time in several years that I have managed to break a box with a regular binary update tool..

*** EDIT: ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ***

So, I found a bit oldish Mepis live-cd and booted it. I mounted Zenwalk's root partition, every file seemed to be in place, permissions all right and so on..I tested and could successfully run /bin/bash from Zenwalk's /bin. Then I tried to
which resulted in
so I thought it can't be Zenwalk's kernel (2.6.17.11) -- this was going on with the Live-CD Mepis kernel (2.6.10 I think), which works correctly. So maybe it's a filesystem error? I would have run fsck but as soon as I tried, I found out that there exists no fsck.xfs, not on Mepis cd at least.

So still waiting for ideas..

no ideas here, sorry.
But as you sayed it looks more like

no ideas here, sorry.
But as you sayed, it looks like a fs error.

You still can boot+chroot ith zenwalk (just quit install process) or zenlive CDs. They know how to deal with xfs.

Hmm you're right I didn't think about using a Zenwalk cd, I'll try it.

Thinking afterwards, I'd find it odd if it actually was a fs error; I could mount and read the disk well anyway, and run bash (from a live-cd), it's just that if I try to set (chroot) the harddisk as root directory, it fails. Even with a live-cd kernel..

The general concensus is that when upgrading to version 4.0 you should to a re-install. Yes you should be able to upgrade but as re-install takes less than 30 minutes it is safer to do that.

"...old Zenwalk 3.x and Slackware 11 X-software packages should be compatible with Zenwalk 4.0. Upgrade has proved to be possible as many testers succeeded in the migration : average users are still recommended to do clean/fresh installs."

http://support.zenwalk.org/index.php/topic,4318.0.html

Yes thanks I read that already. I think I managed to do the "upgrade" just before this crash, successfully, so unless this is somekind of a post-upgrade-update-killing-trick, it must be something else.

Usually when upgrading a distribution major version I do do it using a fresh install, if I have a reason to upgrade. Though having upgraded something as massive as FC4->5 without a single problem I don't think it's always needed..

EDIT:

Despite my good mood I was unable to do anything about it; file system seemed to be intact, kernel all right (running a live-cd kernel posed the same problem), permissions all right and so on..time is running out, so unless I figure out something clever in a day or two, I'll probably do a clean reinstall tomorrow.

Situations just like this show why it's a good idea to have a separate /home

A separately partitioned /home is your best friend.