Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: early boot failure, not sure how to diagnose

[Daiajo Tibdixious]

Sorry about the HTML, didn't realise.

If I press enter, I get a login prompt, and can login as root.
Thats how I know the partitions are mounted but are readonly.
I can't do shutdown or reboot nor write to any disk.

I originally was getting a kernel panic with the boot partition as ext4.
I reformated to ext2, reinstalled grub and recopied the kernel.
There is no panic that I can see now.

On my old system I needed an initramfs & the first few attempts left
me in a similar state: partitions mounted, but all readonly. Fixed
that by letting genkernel generate the initrd.

As far as I can tell all the right stuff is in the right place, I'll
reboot again and check that. I'm also not sure if home is mounted

On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 7:40 PM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net> wrote:
> Daiajo Tibdixious posted on Thu, 08 Aug 2013 18:43:24 +1000 as excerpted:
>
>> I got new hardware for a home desktop a few days ago.
>> Downloaded install-amd64-minimal-20130801.iso and am still booting from
>> that cd as hard drive boot fails.
>>
>> I turned on logging in /etc/rc.conf, but no /var/log/rc.log is produced.
>> The disks are mounted but readonly. I guess from this the problem is
>> occurring before the root partition is mounted.
>
> [Please turn off the HTML.]
>
> If it's mounting the partitions, it can't be before root is mounted.  I
> assume you meant before root is /remounted/ using the options set in
> fstab...
>
>> I only have 4 partitions: boot, swap, root, and home. Since everything
>> important is on the root partition, I'm not using an initramfs.
>
>> I have many times tried to catch the error by watching the screen, but
>> it scrolls past way to fast.
>> The last part of the boot messages before things go crazy is "Switching
>> to clocksource TSC".
>>
>> I've been reading up on grub, but don't see anyway to get more info on
>> what is going wrong.
>
> If the kernel is loading, grub's activating it just fine, so the
> problem's elsewhere.  Further, if root is getting mounted and the display
> is working, that means you have at least the drivers necessary to read
> the disk and the filesystem drivers, plus those for the display,
> configured correctly in your kernel.
>
>> If I boot from the cd and chroot to the disk, everything seems to work
>> fine. /boot is ext2 fs and this is my grug.conf:
>
>> default 0
>> timeout 20
>> splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
>>
>> title Gentoo Linux 3.8.13
>> root (hd0,0)
>> kernel /boot/3.8/13-0/bzImage root=/dev/sda3
>
> Do you get a shell prompt at all, or does it quite before that?  If you
> get a shell prompt, does it react to key presses or is the keyboard
> unresponsive?
>
> What happens if you add init=/bin/bash ?  Does /that/ get you a shell
> prompt?  (That should boot directly to bash instead of to init/openrc, so
> it's a good way to correct problems with them if you can get to it.  Of
> course you'll have to do whatever init you need manually, from there.
> No /proc/ mounted for you or anything, at that stage.)
>
> Do you get any hint that it can load userspace at all?  If the
> init=/bin/bash trick doesn't work, perhaps glibc is messed up, as that'd
> screw both bash and the normal init.  It could also be that it's mounting
> the wrong partition -- if it mounted /home as /, for instance, it
> obviously wouldn't be able to find bash or init to start, let alone the
> libraries they load.
>
> If you have a cellphone or can otherwise take a picture, you could upload
> that to a pastebin site or something and post a link to that (or simply
> attach the image if this list doesn't filter them, I'm honestly not
> sure...), thus avoiding the pain of trying to manually write down the
> kernel panic or whatever.  That could be helpful.
>
> --
> Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
> "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
> and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman
>
>