On Wed, Dec 07, 2005 at 11:10:33AM -0500, Michael George wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 06, 2005 at 09:17:28PM -0700, Richard Fish wrote:
> > On 12/6/05, Michael George <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > Already checked that. The root filesystem does contain /dev/null and
> > > /dev/console are there. However, something is obviously breaking when
> > > udev mounts the /dev system and then those devices are no longer
> > > there...
> >
> > Hmm, take a look at the rules files in /etc/udev/rules.d, and see if
> > there is any obvious corruption there. Same thing with
> > /etc/udev/permissions.d/.
> >
> > At this point, you might have to do something drastic:
> >
> > rm -rvf /etc/udev && emerge --oneshot udev
>
> I'd like to do that, but the problem is that an emerge of udev cannot
> complete. Doesn't get started as a matter of fact. I'm suspecting
> corruption in the FS, but it's quite weird that I can emerge some things
> just fine, btu others never get past the >>>>>>>>>>emerge message...
Well, nothing I do can address the problem. The last things I've done:
I checked the consistency of the disks at the 3ware card, I fsck'd the
filesystems, I tried not using the tarball for the /dev directory, I
changed the permissions of /dev/console to be 660 as per the udev docs.
Nothing seemed to work.
I wanted to pull a tarball of the whole system first, though. So I
booted from CD and chrooted to the HDD partitions. Tar could not
complete. If I didn't chroot, tar could complete just fine. My only
conclusion is that updating the system with bad RAM caused some weird
problems in the filesystem which had nothing to do with consistency.
Even though the problems are VERY strange and I'm a bit skeptical about
this explanation, I can think of no other explanation.
We know the problem happened after an update. We know that the RAM
failed at memtest86. We know that the system cannot boot. We know that
the system cannot rebuild itself in a chroot. We know that the system
couldn't even tarball itself in chroot.
We know that the tar, of the same data, could complete just fine using
the exectuable when booted from the CD-ROM.
I wish I had a way to recover, but I can think of none. The CD isn't
equipped to do emerges (AFAIK) and emerge cannot be told to do a "virtual
chroot" (use the executables on the CD to emerge software in a chroot,
updating portate info inside that chroot -- I'm sure there are serious
issues with wanting to do this, like gcc and glibc versions, but it
would still have helped), I have no choice but reinstall the system and
start over with it.
I'm posting this so that the thread may have closure and whomever might
find it in the archives will know what I tried and that I found no
solution.
Thank you everyone for your helpful advice.
--
-M
There are 10 kinds of people in this world:
Those who can count in binary and those who cannot.
--
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