[gentoo-user] system stopped booting

[Michael George]

I'm having a strange problem with a system that we're putting together
to be an LDAP-based PDC.

I had it all configured and it was working fine.  I had to put the
project aside for a couple weeks as I had other things to work on and
then I came back to it.  Since it had been a while, I updated the whole
system, updated the configs with etc-update, and I'm pretty sure I
rebooted to make sure all was well.

About a week later, I booted it and it wouldn't boot.  It got stuck at
"configuring system to use udev" and never gets okay.  I just sits there
for ever.

I booted a gentoo live cd as a rescue and found that I could chroot into
the broken system and work with it.  I tried to rebuild the whole thing,
but some emerges (one I remember is "udev") would stall.  They will
only get so far as the initial ">>> emerge" line and they will sit there
for ever.

The emerges that fail will always fail.  The emerges that succeed will
do so build after build.

I ran memtest on the RAM and it failed some tests so I thought I'd found
the problem.  A couple weeks later, I have new RAM for it, but it
behaves the same.

I am not sure where to go with this one.  I'm not sure why it won't
build or boot.  The system had been running just fine before the update
and I *think* it booted after it.  However, I realize I might have
dorked some config file in /etc, but I am not sure which it might be...

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd like to find a way out of this other
than reinstalling the system.  Such a thing might happen again in the
future to a non-development system and I'd like to know the way to get it
working again.

Thank you.

-- 
-M

There are 10 kinds of people in this world:
	Those who can count in binary and those who cannot.
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