[gentoo-user] devfs problem: permission denied on /dev/null... boot fails

[Ben Munat]

I've been working on getting my first attempt at installing gentoo 
working for the last three days. Well, I actually had the basic system 
installed, was able to log in, started working on installing X, etc. 
But, everytime I rebooted, the gentoo startup script was kind enough to 
rub it in that I missed adding devfs support when I compiled my kernel.

So, I recompiled the kernel with devfs support (and automount support), 
swapped it out with the old one and rebooted. Unfortunately, I get a 
string of errors, followed by an aborted boot because the filesystems 
can't mount. It gets as far as starting devfsd before it throws the 
first error:

* Mounting devfs at /dev...
* Starting devfsd...
/sbin/rc: line 165: /dev/null: Permission denied
There are several more errors after that, mostly having to do with 
permission being denied on /dev/null or filesystem mounting failures. 
Once it finally gives up, it'll let me log in as root to a maintenance 
console. Doing an ls on /dev at that point shows nothing but initctl.

I stared at /sbin/rc for a while, but I'm not up on shell scripting 
enough to know if there's something wrong in it... I suppose it could 
also be something in my devfsd.conf file or some other config file. Was 
also wondering if there was some /etc update thingy I needed to do after 
I made the change to the kernel...

Any help would be greatly appreciated! I'm totally stumped.

BTW, I'm using LVM for all my partitions except / and /boot and I'm 
using reiserfs for everything. I also saved my first kernel "just in 
case" (:-) and have set that up as a boot option in grub.

Thanks in advance.

Ben

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