On Tue, Dec 16, 2003 at 12:01:52PM +0100, Dirk Heinrichs wrote: > Am Tuesday 16 December 2003 10:32 schrieb ext john gennard: > > Hmm, you should. I just booted into a Live CD (1.4 RC4) and when I get a > prompt, dmesg gives me the info I want (near the end): > > inserting floppy driver for 2.4.20-xfs-r2 > Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M > > And, the LiveCD in fact uses devfs so you should have something like: > > ls -l /dev/fd0 > lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 8 Dec 3 09:26 /dev/fd0 -> floppy/0 > > ls -l /dev/floppy/0 > brw-rw---- 1 root root 2, 0 Jan 1 1970 /dev/floppy/0 > > From this I guess you're trying to access the floppy from within chroot, is > this correct? If so, can you access the floppy when _not_ in chroot (i.e. > mke2fs /dev/floppy/0), right after booting LiveCD? > All of the above works. My biggest mistake was in thinking that as the CD boots putting a setup into (is it?) a ramdisk or memory this was not of importance other than to use to create Gentoo on my hard drive.
> So we need to clarify which /dev we are talking about, the one from the CD, > created by devfs, or the one in chroot, which is a statical one unless you > deleted its contents and did the bind mount as in the handbook, chapter > 6.a. Since I use devfs, here is what I did when I installed gentoo: > Now I understand (or think I do!) where the problem is. I elected not to use devfs - some time ago I had a look at it and couldn't understand it, so I left it for the future. But it still puzzles me that things don't work when I take an option offered - I'm also surprised that nowhere in the literature is a floppy drive mentioned (not even in the fstab template). Still, there must be good reasons. > Before chroot'ing, I deleted the contents of the future /dev (which > is /mnt/gentoo/dev, if you follow the handbook precisely) with "rm > -rf /mnt/gentoo/dev/*" and the bind-mounted (means: made visible) /dev from > the cd on /mnt/gentoo/dev as described in the handbook. > > > Since I use grub, I never created a lilo floppy, but I guess you don't need > to mount it, since lilo writes to the floppy device (/dev/floppy/0) > directly. > > So, could you > > 1) boot with the live cd > 2) issue dmesg to verify that the floppy driver is active > 3) verify that the floppy works, using mke2fs as above > 4) then mount your allready prepared gentoo install (/dev/hdXY) > on /mnt/gentoo > 4) to be save, rename /dev on /mnt/gentoo and make a new one: > mv /mnt/gentoo/dev /mnt/gentoo/dev.bak; mkdir /mnt/gentoo/dev > 5) bind-mount /dev from the live cd: mount -o bind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev > 6) enter the chroot environment as per handbook > 7) try 3) again > > Tell me how far you get with this. If this all works, there should be no > problem with genkernel, either. But you should now also enable devfs in > your kernel config. > All the above work and the new /dev directory was created, so I should be able to create a good /etc/fstab and put lilo on a floppy as I like to do. I now must manually recompile the kernel - genkernel worked fine, but includes things I'll never need and far too many modules. Dirk, I am most grateful for the time you have devoted to helping me out. Laying out what to do is always of considerable educational value as I can study the man pages and O'Reilly's works of reference and hopefully retain the knowledge. Very many thanks, I will (hopefully) let you know when I have a fully operational Gentoo installation. Regards, John. > HTH... > > Dirk > -- > Dirk Heinrichs | Tel: +49 (0)151 1513 6954 > Configuration Manager | Fax: +49 (0)211 47068 111 > Cap Gemini Ernst & Young| Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Hambornerstra?e 55 | Web: http://www.cgey.com > D-40472 D?sseldorf | ICQ#: 110037733 > GPG Public Key C2E467BB | Keyserver: www.keyserver.net -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
