[SWLUG] What to do if there is a problem at startup...

[Pete Phillips]

Hi Rhys

Can't speak for gentoo, but I've done exactly the same thing with Suse
and Redhat (6.* and 7.*) to fix various problems - boot into recovery
disks, chroot, and fix things.  I used to use Toms root disk with RH,
but not used that for a few years. When I've had problems with dev, I
have used the MAKEDEV program (it used to be in /dev itself I think, but
on my current SuSE (9.3) is /sbin/MAKEDEV).

I have used this to reconstruct a hosed /dev before, but it's been a few
years since I've needed to run it. YMMV :-)

BTW - it is a shell script, so it's worth lessing it to see what the
options are. Also, I am totally ignorant about how well it plays with
udev (I assume it does).

Pete



>>>>> "Rhys" == Rhys Hardwick <rhys at rhyshardwick.co.uk> writes:

    Rhys> System - Gentoo Linux 2005.1 Hey there guys,

    Rhys> I have had to just recover from a problem with udev.
    Rhys> udevstart was segfaulting, and so on startup, /dev was not
    Rhys> populated.  Therefore, no devices at all, therefore no login,
    Rhys> no fixing the udev program.  Putting 'single' at the end of
    Rhys> the kernel startup line in grub did no good.  I fixed it by
    Rhys> booting from the Gentoo live cd, and doing the following...

    Rhys> 	# mount my main partition.  $ mount /dev/hda1
    Rhys> /mnt/gentoo

    Rhys> 	# chroot into it $ chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash

    Rhys> 	# mount the proc file system $ mount -t proc none /proc

    Rhys> From here, I got the latest portage update, and updated udev,
    Rhys> which fixed the problem.

    Rhys> I was wondering if this was the best way of recovering from a
    Rhys> problem like this.  Is there anything I should be wary of when
    Rhys> chrooting into an existing gentoo system?  Anything I
    Rhys> shouldn't do?

    Rhys> Rhys



		
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