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I am attempting to repair and upgrade an Arch Linux system. I boot off of a Live USB which is a newer version than the original install. Then I mount the sda and chroot to its mount point. When I run mkinitcpio -p linux, I get the error from the title:
'/lib/modules/4.9.8-1-ARCH' is not a valid kernel module directory
lib/modules/ has 4.13.3-1-ARCH. How do I tell mkinitcpio to use this directory instead?
The problem is that I forgot to mount my boot partition to /boot when I upgraded my entire system, including the Linux kernel. After dealing with some issues with pacman and PGP keys, I finally ran pacman -S filesystem linux and I am able to boot off of my HDD. (I'm not sure if filesystem was required to fix this problem, but it was referenced in other sources.)
filesystem linux and everything worked.
Dec 5, 2017 at 23:29
Just fyi, I had a similar issue and fixed it with just pacman -S linux. I don't think filesystem was needed.
I had the same issue and reinstalling with pacman -S linux did not help. In fact the error appeared when updating linux-aarch64 in the first place because that triggers the post-transaction hook for mkinitcpio!
The problem in my case was that /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux-aarch64.preset was not replaced by the update but a .pacnew file was installed. So the preset still pointed to the old modules directory. Moving the new preset in place fixed it:
# mv /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux-aarch64.preset{.pacnew,}
# pacman -S linux-aarch64
uname -r && pacman -Q linux?4.12.8-2-ARCHandlinux 4.13.3-1/bootwasn't mounted when you upgraded your kernel. Make sure it is, re-run the kernel upgrade and you should be good.