[gentoo-user] Strange boot problem - any ideas?

[Helmut Jarausch]

Hi,

I have to power down one of my machines each day.
Booting it the other day fails from time to time.
On this (and all my machines)  /usr is on an ext4 file system by its 
own. It looks as if mounting /usr fails sometimes (silently).
The first unusual message is that it cannot find the file
/usr/sbin/acpid . After that, most other actions fail as well.

Once the machine has failed to boot it will fail every time afterwards
unless I do the following:
I boot by a rescue CD, change root and re-emerge sys-power/acpid (this 
package contains /usr/sbin/acpid).
This single action has helped without any problem each time I had to 
try it.

Of course, I've done many checks on the drive hosting the /usr 
partition - no errors at all (the drive is only a few months old and a 
good one (enterprise edition)).

So, I suspect openrc. Might it be that this is a timing problem and 
openrc doesn't check if the partition is mounted? Booting has worked 
just flawlessly on that machine for more than a year. It looks as if a 
recent version of openrc (currently 0.6.8) has generated this problem.

Thanks for any hint,
Helmut.