Andrei Borzenkov writes:
filesystem package tries to move the content of /bin, /sbin, /lib and /lib64 into corresponding /usr subdirectory and replace these directories with links.
Yes, I meanwhile figured out that this might be a related to the UsrMerge story, still digging into all the bug reports.
It runs script /usr/libexec/convertfs that should be present on your root. You can edit this script, replace ROOT= at the beginning with ROOT=/your-root-mount-point and try to run it (you do not need to chroot). Or you could simply try "chroot /usr/libexec/convertfs", but it depends on /bin/bash being available in your root.
No, bash is already unstartable. So do I read you correctly that if I fix this up manually then I should be able to run the script and regain the ability to chroot into the root fs so I can run the zypper dup to completion?
You can check the current state of the directories above (and their /usr counterparts).
Later… Well, now that I knew that I had to look for UsrMerge, I've found this page: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Usr_merge, especially the FAQ there. Lo and behold just adding the two links made the chroot (or rather the bash it's trying to start) work again. I couldn't get the network up in the rescue system and I didn't manage to get zypper to work just with the already downloaded information in the caches, so I tried booting, which worked. A lot of things didn't come up correctly, but it got to the root prompt and I did the convertfs. Another reboot later and after some manual fixes (DNS wasn't working and somehow the ethernet interface had an rp_filter active on IPv4, SSH ingress still gets filtered out) I've got zypper to re-install the filesystem package. I'm currently letting it to update the remaining ~7000 packages it didn't get to yesterday. Regards, Achim. -- +<[Q+ Matrix-12 WAVE#46+305 Neuron microQkb Andromeda XTk Blofeld]>+ SD adaptations for KORG EX-800 and Poly-800MkII V0.9: http://Synth.Stromeko.net/Downloads.html#KorgSDada