boot fails after over 6 months of perfection

[butters]

I installed 1.4_rc1 soon after it came out, and besides a couple unsolvable hangups, things have been great. That is until I woke up yesterday to an unresponsive computer that would not accept any keyboard input, switch consoles, or do anything other than move the mouse and change the window focus in Fluxbox. I hard restarted the box and was rather dismayed when after the kernel booted (as normal), init failed on its first task, mounting /proc. I was offered to boot in single user mode, which I did, and I found that mount segfaults. Also ps complains about missing libraries, and almost every command fails.

What was perplexing is that for some time I had been constantly updating my packages, but about a month or so before this happened I decided that everything worked to my satisfaction and I stopped updating anything. I wasn't logged in as root at the time of the problem, and fsck from the LiveCD finds no problems with my filesystems. I was able to use ftp on the CD to rescue most of my home directory (minus movies and cartoons) to a safe place, but I still have no clue why I can't boot normally.

Does this ring a bell for anyone? Or am I starting all over after finals?

By the way, I'm currently exploring migrating wireless network monitoring tasks over to linux, and I was wondering if there are any available clients for logging SNR for connections to wireless APs. Oh yeah, and I like the framebuffer support on the 1.4_rc4 install, I just hope this means I can finally get it working in practice (I remember those headaches). Later!!
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If tugboats were bigger, they'd be the ones getting tugged.

[Jimbow]

Could it be that someone broke in?
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After Perl everything else is just assembly language.

[pjp]

Perhaps something went wrong with a gcc or glibc upgrade, or some other critical package.
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Quis separabit? Quo animo?

[StuBear]

At a minimum I'd try booting from the livecd , chrooting and remerging mount. Sounds like it could be a glibc incompatability problem. Hopefully remerging mount will fix it.