mknod null c 2 2 did the trick, things boot/reboot alright now. I think that biggest concern (unclean shutdown/reboot) is solved (collision of /dev and a tmpfs mount, caused by default behavior of init in face of missing /dev/console).
This disk was prepared remotely (I.e. from another running NetBSD box) by partitioning the disk (disklabel), formatting (newfs), then mounting all partitions appropriately under /mnt and running ./build.sh ... install=/mnt Clearly some things didn't fully work. I've got some shutdown msgs that seem new (though in situations like this (suspect system), under hard scrutiny a lot of things start looking "new")... I'll post that in a new thread, as I think it's out of scope for this threads intended purpose... Thanks everyone for the help. I learned a bit more, and had fun. -bch On Jul 22, 2016 12:32 PM, "bch" <[email protected]> wrote: > For some reason /dev/null is just a regular file... looking for its device > special numbers to put it in by mknod... > > I see what you're saying, did it (and do have a console device), but now > my etc/defaults/rc.d is barfing on: cannot create /dev/null: read only file > system > On Jul 22, 2016 11:41 AM, "Martin Husemann" <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 11:37:56AM -0700, bch wrote: >> > How does that happen, how does one fix it ? >> >> It is created by init if there is no /dev/console. >> >> Boot some install media, mount your root file system (say on /mnt) >> then: >> >> cd /mnt/dev >> sh MAKEDEV all >> >> (hoping there is a MAKEDEV script there, if not: extract it from etc.tgz >> from the install sets) >> >> Then reboot and check mount again. >> >> Martin >> >
