Re: [gentoo-amd64] early boot failure, not sure how to diagnose

[Drake Donahue <donahue95@comcast.net>]

On Fri, 2013-08-09 at 09:07 +1000, Daiajo Tibdixious wrote:
> Logged in after failed boot.
> /home & /boot are mounted, but nothing in them when I ls.
> ls of / shows all the normal things there.
> 
> While logged in, I'm still getting boot messages, where USB devices,
> eg the mouse, disconnect and reconnect.
> 
> There are a ridiculous number of sd devices in /dev. sda, sdb, sdc,
> sdd all go to 15. sda is the hard drive, sdb/sdc for USB devices.
> Never had sdd.
> 
> Did see some errors, notably "cannot mount /run" bad superblock or
> something like that. Its hard to scroll back with USB messages
> constantly appearing, half a screenful each time.
> 
> On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 6:40 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann
> <volkerarmin@googlemail.com> wrote:
> > Am 08.08.2013 10:43, schrieb Daiajo Tibdixious:
> >> 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.
> >>
> >> 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 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
> >>
> >
> >
> > and what is happening?
> >
> 
does your kernel config have:
CONFIG_DEVTMPFS=y 
CONFIG_DEVTMPFS_MOUNT=y 
CONFIG_HOTPLUG=y 
CONFIG_FSNOTIFY=y 
CONFIG_DNOTIFY=y 
CONFIG_INOTIFY_USER=y 
CONFIG_NET=y 
CONFIG_PROC_FS=y 
CONFIG_SIGNALFD=y 
CONFIG_SYSFS=y 
CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED is not set 
CONFIG_UEVENT_HELPER_PATH="" 
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_BSG=y 
CONFIG_TMPFS=y 
CONFIG_TMPFS_POSIX_ACL=y 
CONFIG_TMPFS_XATTR=y