Arch Linux

did you noticed if the initrd was generated before or after kmod was installed?

paste the packages update log from pacman.log

In fact, maybe I did something wrong, because I did upgrade the repositories to testing just before, and that didn't go so well...
But I think the relevant lines are as follow (see below).
The initrd appears to be done after the kmod install.

after booting another distro to see what happened, I was able to see that SATA modules were built and in the ramdisk, but not loaded.
I was able to modprobe ahci in the recovery shell, and my disk appeared in /dev ...
After that, I try to remove 'autodetect' from mkinitcpio hppk, and built initrd again, without luck...

So the workaround I found it to add this to mkinitcpio.conf:
MODULES="ahci"

Here are my hooks:
HOOKS="base udev autodetect pata scsi sata uresume filesystems usbinput"

I think I didn't touch this line and that it was OK in 3.1

Please feel free to ask more questions, and I am sorry, I can't help you a lot, I am not familiar with arch yet...


here are the relevan lines from pacman.log:

[2012-01-08 11:06] starting full system upgrade
[2012-01-08 11:06] Running 'pacman -Syu pacman'
[2012-01-08 11:06] synchronizing package lists
[2012-01-08 11:06] starting full system upgrade
[2012-01-08 11:07] warning: /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf saved as /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf.pacsave
[2012-01-08 11:07] removed module-init-tools (3.16-3)
[2012-01-08 11:07] upgraded pacman (4.0.1-3 -> 4.0.1-3)
[2012-01-08 11:07] upgraded coreutils (8.14-1 -> 8.15-1)
[2012-01-08 11:07] upgraded gvfs (1.10.1-1 -> 1.10.1-2)
[2012-01-08 11:07] upgraded gvfs-obexftp (1.10.1-1 -> 1.10.1-2)
[2012-01-08 11:07] upgraded gvfs-smb (1.10.1-1 -> 1.10.1-2)
[2012-01-08 11:07] warning: /etc/rc.conf installed as /etc/rc.conf.pacnew
[2012-01-08 11:07] upgraded initscripts (2011.12.1-1 -> 2012.01.2-1)
[2012-01-08 11:08] upgraded kdelibs (4.7.4-4 -> 4.7.4-5)
[2012-01-08 11:08] upgraded kdebase-runtime (4.7.4-2 -> 4.7.4-3)
[2012-01-08 11:08] upgraded libdrm (2.4.29-1 -> 2.4.30-1)
[2012-01-08 11:08] installed kmod (3-4)
[2012-01-08 11:08] upgraded util-linux (2.20.1-1 -> 2.20.1-2)
[2012-01-08 11:08] upgraded mkinitcpio (0.8.0-3 -> 0.8.1-1)
[2012-01-08 11:08] >>> Updating module dependencies. Please wait ...
[2012-01-08 11:08] >>> Generating initial ramdisk, using mkinitcpio. Please wait...
[2012-01-08 11:08] ==> Building image from preset: 'default'
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> -k /boot/vmlinuz-linux -c /etc/mkinitcpio.conf -g /boot/initramfs-linux.img
[2012-01-08 11:08] ==> Starting build: 3.2.0-2-ARCH
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> Parsing hook: [base]
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> Parsing hook: [udev]
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> Parsing hook: [autodetect]
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> Parsing hook: [pata]
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> Parsing hook: [scsi]
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> Parsing hook: [sata]
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> Parsing hook: [uresume]
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> Parsing hook: [filesystems]
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> Parsing hook: [usbinput]
[2012-01-08 11:08] ==> Generating module dependencies
[2012-01-08 11:08] ==> Creating xz initcpio image: /boot/initramfs-linux.img
[2012-01-08 11:08] ==> Image generation successful
[2012-01-08 11:08] ==> Building image from preset: 'fallback'
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> -k /boot/vmlinuz-linux -c /etc/mkinitcpio.conf -g /boot/initramfs-linux-fallback.img -S autodetect
[2012-01-08 11:08] ==> Starting build: 3.2.0-2-ARCH
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> Parsing hook: [base]
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> Parsing hook: [udev]
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> Parsing hook: [pata]
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> Parsing hook: [scsi]
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> Parsing hook: [sata]
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> Parsing hook: [uresume]
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> Parsing hook: [filesystems]
[2012-01-08 11:08] -> Parsing hook: [usbinput]
[2012-01-08 11:08] ==> Generating module dependencies
[2012-01-08 11:08] ==> Creating xz initcpio image: /boot/initramfs-linux-fallback.img
[2012-01-08 11:08] Running 'pacman -S meld'
[2012-01-08 11:08] ==> Image generation successful
[2012-01-08 11:08] upgraded linux (3.1.7-1 -> 3.2-2)

You're running a known bad version of kmod. Please install 3-5 and regenerate your initramfs.

OK I'll do that and will let you know if it fixes the problem.
but how did it happen?
isn't there a dependency between the 3.2 kernel and kmod 3.5?

There were some problems with the previous versions of kmod http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2012-January/022325.html

Do you see such a dependency between the kernel and kmod? I certainly don't. This is just a dupe of  FS#27862 .

falconindy was right, I have rebuilt the initramfs after installing kmod-3.5 and everything is ok now.
Thanks