[Sussex] Getting brave ?, perhaps not.

[John Crowhurst]

> This probably sounds a stupid question, but as the error from my earlier
> post  says "tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors"
>
> the only tar command that I've invoked at this stage is
>
> " tar -xvjpf /mnt/cdrom/stages/stage3-pentium4-20030910.tar.bz2"
>
> Could it be that the "-xvjpf" bit is wrong? because I don't really
> understand  the output of "man tar" and previously the only bit of
> "untarring" that I've  done has been tar.gz files for my now retired
> speedtouch adsl modem and some  stuff from kde-look.org and from memory,
> I've always used tar -zxvf. I sort  of understand that the letters
> (arguements ???) may be different, but I've  only ever seen 4, whereas
> the "-xvjpf" is exactly as it says in the gentoo  install guide.

-x (eXtract - Extract from the file)
-v (Verbose - See the tar program output)
-j (bzip2 - use bzip2 to extract the tarball)
-z (gZip - use gzip to extract the tarball)
-f (File - use specified file instead of /dev/tape)
-p (Preserve - Preserves the file and user permissions)

You might like to try:

tar -xvjpf filename |less

Then you will see what tar is outputing, and you will be able to scroll up
and down to see where the problem lies.

tar is renowned for continuing over a possible problem. If it can't
extract a file because of a permissions problem for instance, it will
simply continue extracting all the other files until the end, then report
that it had a problem when it gets to the end.

I don't quite understand the double mounting for /dev/hda4 though.

You could do:

# mount /dev/hda4 /mnt/gentoo
# mkdir /mnt/gentoo/boot

Then the files that go in /boot will be installed in /boot anyway.
Mounting the same partition will simply put the contents of /boot into /
wouldn't it?

-- 
John