No boot after Initrd update

When installing certain packages in Debian (like ntfs-3g), the package manager will make automatic modifications to the initrd under /boot. I've done this a couple times now and had to reinstall the system each time. So I assume the issue is that something in the modification of initrd is causing the system to fail to boot. If I am correct, I have 2 questions.

Aside from marking the initrd as read-only, is there a solution for this?

Instead of having to reinstall the system from scratch, is there a way to install deb packages on the arm based usb drive from an x86_64 machine?

You should be able to see what caused the problem booting in serial console. Do you have a log of that you can post here?

As a temporary work around, you can backup the initrd in /boot to initrd-xxx.save, install, and if it fails to boot, restore it using a different Linux box, just use the old initrd for booting. And you could try to regenerate it manually with

update-initramfs -u

-bodhi
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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/16/2014 04:10PM by bodhi.

After more testing, it turns out that initrd updates are not be the cause of my problems. (Or perhaps only certain updates of initrd? Or possibly something else entirely?) If I find out more, I'll let you know.

Unfortunately, I don't have a serial console hookup. I can't do soldering for my life. haha Currently, the only way I know to check logs is to pull out the usb, connect it to my pc, and view the log files - var/log/dmesg

So yeah, your idea about backing up initrd is good. I will do that.

I backed up the entire /boot directory, and I've found that a text file became corrupted with binary data. So I now suspect the problem is my old flash drive. As a fix, I've edited the fstab to mount my flash drive as read-only. When I need to make any modifications will I temporarily remount the drive as read-write.