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
