[unsolved] boot problems after upgrade

I had some kind of problem with mkinitcpio during a long overdue upgrade on my uncle's system. It was dropping out on the udev early hook with an error that it couldn't determine the file system type. Commands such as blkid, fsck will all be clean, and so you know it's in GRUB or the mkinitcpio, or possibly the kernel line or some other related issue.

# set

You should see some line like BOOT_IMAGE /boot/vmlinuz-linux

fix (3hrs)

Fresh reinstall. See this post. Your only problem is if the Arch install is through password-protected WiFi instead of ethernet. You'll have to HAND COPY your wpa_supplicant.conf into the installation machine prior to pacstrap, since there is no way to mount an inserted USB into the machine prior to pacstrap, yet WiFi must be on prior to pacstrap. It's a double bind, not unheard of during Arch installations. Said otherwise, there's no legal mount for the USB in the ramdisk.

no fix (20hrs)

Unfortunately, to match the system you're fixing, you'll have to download the latest core arch install ISO to access GRUB. The reason is not that GRUB cannot find the linux kernel, you see it found it right away. The re
linux line parameters "bootparam" man page is 50% helpful, more here , and not listed "rootfstype=ext2"
kernel modules
grub modules (grub manual)
initramfs (mkinitcpio) modules

running early hook [udev]
starting version 239
running hook [udev]
ERROR:device '' not found. Skipping fsck
mounting '' on real root
mount: /new_root: no filesystem type specified.
You are now being dropped into an emergency shell.
sh: can't access tty;job control turned off

udev hooks early hooks
multiple kernel options in Grub

Press "e" on the large 2 line Grub menu to see the params inside the grub. And then, if you want the rescue prompt, go to F2.

grub>

hahah... of course!
"There are different types of hooks [earlyhook, hook, latehook, cleanuphook]. Apart from that it should be in order."
uname -r and mkinitcpio -M, display the same information, the running kernel. However, after updating, the kernel mkinitcpio compiles with is the newer version, so it displays an error.

possibly gold plate post