Re: [gentoo-ppc-user] yaboot has kicked my butt - 5 times?!

[Joseph Jezak]

On 09/22/10 23:33, Mark Knecht wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 6:33 PM, Joseph Jezak <josejx@g.o> wrote:
>>  On 09/22/10 18:59, Mark Knecht wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>   OK, I'm dead tired. I admit it - yaboot has kicked my butt this
>>> time around. Can anyone help? I did post this problem here 2-3 weeks
>>> ago but still haven't been able to solve the problem so I'm back to
>>> the well for another drink.
>>>
>>>   The machine is the original 80GB PPC Mac Mini. I used to run Gentoo
>>> on it and it ran great for years so I know at one time yaboot worked
>>> just fine. For various reasons I hadn't updated it in a long, long
>>> time (2 years) and instead of trying to go through the Gentoo update
>>> process which is difficult after that much time I decided to just do a
>>> new install. I saved copies of my kernel config and etc/make.conf but
>>> unfortunately, being primarily an x86 guy didn't think to save
>>> yaboot.conf and fstab. I've now done 5 complete Gentoo installs,
>>> starting over from scratch in case something I was doing was messing
>>> things up but so far I cannot get the machine to boot. Every time, no
>>> matter what I do at install time, I get a message
>>>
>>> "Can't check if filesystem is mounted due to a missing mtab file"
>>>
>>> A somewhat out of focus screen shot is shown here:
>>>
>>> http://www.flickr.com/photos/29328985@N03/5014227831
>>>
>>> Generally speaking I'm following the Gentoo PPC install guide located here:
>>>
>>> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-ppc.xml?part=1&chap=10
> <SNIP>
>
>> After looking at the screen shot, I think I have a different idea as to
>> why it might be failing and I don't think it's Yaboot.  If you've gotten
>> to init, yaboot's job is already done.
>>
>> Can you boot the install CD and chroot into the install again? When you
>> get it up and running, check to see if fsck.ext3 exists. Even if it
>> does, re-emerge e2fsprogs and see if that helps.
>> -Joe
> Very interesting. OK - I'm in the chroot now and reinstalling
> e2fsprogs as you suggest. I'll reboot in a minute and check if it
> helped. (OK - I rebooted and it didn't fix anything unfortunately. Too
> bad. Thanks for the idea though.)
>
> I was wondering if this was one of those things where device names
> were changing. They were hda all through the install, which is
> different from the Install Guide. I've tried to adjust my yaboot.conf
> file accordingly but maybe it cannot find the disk at that point
> because the name changed or something. I cannot see anything in the
> boot screen to indicate that but I suppose it's possible.
>
> While I'm here in the chroot I decided to poke around a bit. Note that
> section 9d of the install guide says that e2fsprogs is already
> installed as part of the system and indeed it appears to be as shown
> below. However I note that I cannot run updatedb for slocate without
> also getting a message about /etc/mtab not existing. Should mtab exist
> withing the chroot?
>
> (chroot) livecd / # emerge -pv e2fsprogs
>
> These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
>
> Calculating dependencies... done!
> [ebuild   R   ] sys-fs/e2fsprogs-1.41.11  USE="nls" 4,368 kB
>
> Total: 1 package (1 reinstall), Size of downloads: 4,368 kB
> (chroot) livecd / # slocate fsck.*
> slocate: fatal error: Could not find user database
> '/var/lib/slocate/slocate.db':  No such file or directory
> (chroot) livecd / # updatedb
> updatedb: fatal error: load_file: Could not open file: /etc/mtab: No
> such file or directory
> updatedb: fatal error: parse_fs_exclude: Could not load file data: /etc/mtab
> ^C
> (chroot) livecd / #
>
>
> Indeed, on a different system /etc/mtab exists:
>
> gandalf ~ # cat /etc/mtab
> /dev/sda3 / ext3 rw,noatime,commit=0 0 0
> proc /proc proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0
> sysfs /sys sysfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0
> udev /dev tmpfs rw,nosuid,relatime,size=10240k,mode=755 0 0
> devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620 0 0
> /dev/sda5 /home/herb ext3 rw,noatime,commit=0 0 0
> shm /dev/shm tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
> none /proc/fs/vmblock/mountPoint vmblock rw 0 0
> gandalf ~ #
>
> However on my MacMini it simply doesn't exist:
>
> (chroot) livecd / # ls -la /etc/mtab
> ls: cannot access /etc/mtab: No such file or directory
> (chroot) livecd / #
>
> So the question is what provides mtab? Have I missed some step in the
> install process 5 times? Man, that would be embarrassing but I'd
> gladly suffer the shame if I got the machine working! ;-)
>
> Thanks for your help. Still looking.
>
> Cheers,
> Mark
>
>

mtab is generated on boot as you mount devices. It's not the problem here.

Can you try adding this line to your yaboot config? It will make the
system boot directly into a shell instead of starting init:
### Put this in the kernel section
append="init=/bin/bash"

Once this boots, does hda* exist in /dev? How about /dev/null and /dev/zero?

-Joe