Gentoo Archives: gentoo-ppc-user

From: Mark Knecht <markknecht@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-ppc-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-ppc-user] yaboot has kicked my butt - 5 times?!
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2010 04:09:38
Message-Id: AANLkTimq0sWBG6ccaWtjcE0U7XK3VwTc5A0ih0JBnp6S@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-ppc-user] yaboot has kicked my butt - 5 times?! by Joseph Jezak
1 On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 6:33 PM, Joseph Jezak <josejx@g.o> wrote:
2 >  On 09/22/10 18:59, Mark Knecht wrote:
3 >> Hi,
4 >>   OK, I'm dead tired. I admit it - yaboot has kicked my butt this
5 >> time around. Can anyone help? I did post this problem here 2-3 weeks
6 >> ago but still haven't been able to solve the problem so I'm back to
7 >> the well for another drink.
8 >>
9 >>   The machine is the original 80GB PPC Mac Mini. I used to run Gentoo
10 >> on it and it ran great for years so I know at one time yaboot worked
11 >> just fine. For various reasons I hadn't updated it in a long, long
12 >> time (2 years) and instead of trying to go through the Gentoo update
13 >> process which is difficult after that much time I decided to just do a
14 >> new install. I saved copies of my kernel config and etc/make.conf but
15 >> unfortunately, being primarily an x86 guy didn't think to save
16 >> yaboot.conf and fstab. I've now done 5 complete Gentoo installs,
17 >> starting over from scratch in case something I was doing was messing
18 >> things up but so far I cannot get the machine to boot. Every time, no
19 >> matter what I do at install time, I get a message
20 >>
21 >> "Can't check if filesystem is mounted due to a missing mtab file"
22 >>
23 >> A somewhat out of focus screen shot is shown here:
24 >>
25 >> http://www.flickr.com/photos/29328985@N03/5014227831
26 >>
27 >> Generally speaking I'm following the Gentoo PPC install guide located here:
28 >>
29 >> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-ppc.xml?part=1&chap=10
30 <SNIP>
31
32 > After looking at the screen shot, I think I have a different idea as to
33 > why it might be failing and I don't think it's Yaboot.  If you've gotten
34 > to init, yaboot's job is already done.
35 >
36 > Can you boot the install CD and chroot into the install again? When you
37 > get it up and running, check to see if fsck.ext3 exists. Even if it
38 > does, re-emerge e2fsprogs and see if that helps.
39 > -Joe
40
41 Very interesting. OK - I'm in the chroot now and reinstalling
42 e2fsprogs as you suggest. I'll reboot in a minute and check if it
43 helped. (OK - I rebooted and it didn't fix anything unfortunately. Too
44 bad. Thanks for the idea though.)
45
46 I was wondering if this was one of those things where device names
47 were changing. They were hda all through the install, which is
48 different from the Install Guide. I've tried to adjust my yaboot.conf
49 file accordingly but maybe it cannot find the disk at that point
50 because the name changed or something. I cannot see anything in the
51 boot screen to indicate that but I suppose it's possible.
52
53 While I'm here in the chroot I decided to poke around a bit. Note that
54 section 9d of the install guide says that e2fsprogs is already
55 installed as part of the system and indeed it appears to be as shown
56 below. However I note that I cannot run updatedb for slocate without
57 also getting a message about /etc/mtab not existing. Should mtab exist
58 withing the chroot?
59
60 (chroot) livecd / # emerge -pv e2fsprogs
61
62 These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
63
64 Calculating dependencies... done!
65 [ebuild R ] sys-fs/e2fsprogs-1.41.11 USE="nls" 4,368 kB
66
67 Total: 1 package (1 reinstall), Size of downloads: 4,368 kB
68 (chroot) livecd / # slocate fsck.*
69 slocate: fatal error: Could not find user database
70 '/var/lib/slocate/slocate.db': No such file or directory
71 (chroot) livecd / # updatedb
72 updatedb: fatal error: load_file: Could not open file: /etc/mtab: No
73 such file or directory
74 updatedb: fatal error: parse_fs_exclude: Could not load file data: /etc/mtab
75 ^C
76 (chroot) livecd / #
77
78
79 Indeed, on a different system /etc/mtab exists:
80
81 gandalf ~ # cat /etc/mtab
82 /dev/sda3 / ext3 rw,noatime,commit=0 0 0
83 proc /proc proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0
84 sysfs /sys sysfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0
85 udev /dev tmpfs rw,nosuid,relatime,size=10240k,mode=755 0 0
86 devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620 0 0
87 /dev/sda5 /home/herb ext3 rw,noatime,commit=0 0 0
88 shm /dev/shm tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
89 none /proc/fs/vmblock/mountPoint vmblock rw 0 0
90 gandalf ~ #
91
92 However on my MacMini it simply doesn't exist:
93
94 (chroot) livecd / # ls -la /etc/mtab
95 ls: cannot access /etc/mtab: No such file or directory
96 (chroot) livecd / #
97
98 So the question is what provides mtab? Have I missed some step in the
99 install process 5 times? Man, that would be embarrassing but I'd
100 gladly suffer the shame if I got the machine working! ;-)
101
102 Thanks for your help. Still looking.
103
104 Cheers,
105 Mark

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