On Sun, 21 Oct 2007 17:15:34 +0200
econti <contiemilio@alice.it> wrote:

> Hi all,
> after upgrading xorg, yesterday I started to upgrade gcc (from 3.x to 
> 4.x) following the Gentoo GCC Upgrade Guide. All went well up to
> "emerge -eav system".
> The command seemed work fine but, for some reason, it was not able to 
> emerge "man-pages". The process aborted.
> I added other gentoo sites to my make.conf and emerged  the remaining 
> portages starting from "man-pages".
> At the end running etc-update I found 26 config files to upgrade .
> Surely I did something wrong (to upgrade "udev" I had to unmerge 
> "coldplug") and the result has been a failure in booting gentoo.
> Here is the message:
> 
> /sbin/rc: line 400: start: command not found
> Failed to start /etc/init.d/checkroot
> One or more critical startup scripts failed to start!
> Please correct this, and reboot ...
> 
> Any suggestion? Should I reinstall everything?
> 
> Regards
> Emilio
> 

Try re-emerging sys-apps/baselayout.