Re: [gentoo-user] Machine not booting properly: profile.env cannot execute binary file

[Andrew Lowe <agl@wht.com.au>]

On 25/10/17 11:28, Andrew Lowe wrote:
> Hi all,
>     My machine went feral which resulted in me having to kill the power
> to kill it. Upon reboot everything looked good, fsck did it's job,
> [ok]'s scrolled up the screen etc and then I got the login prompt. I
> entered my username & password and then the fun began.
> 
>     I got:
> 
> -bash: .: /etc/profile.env: cannot execute binary file
> 
> If I tried any command, say ls, I got:
> 
> -bash: ls: no such file or dir
> 
>     I've now rebooted the machine using a relatively recent sysrescueCD
> and had a look at profile.env and it's binary but I thought it should
> have been text!!!! In the top line or so it mentions "ld" for some
> reason. I checked the same file on the boot disk and it's text. One or
> two I found on line are also text.
> 
>     Does anyone have any idea as to what's going on here? Should I just
> grab the profile.env from the boot disk and drop it into the /etc dir?
> Or should I go through the whole process of chroot off a gentoo disc and
> then run env-update as it says in the header of the text versions I'v seen?
> 
>     Thoughts greatly appreciated,
> 
>         Andrew
> 
> 

	Well, I managed to work this out. I grabbed profile.env from a laptop
running gentoo and using sysrescuecd booted the desktop and dropped
profile.env into it's /etc dir. Fiddled the permissions and rebooted.
This time after the reboot, it only told me that it couldn't find
commands, ls, cd etc. Obviously pathing wasn't working. I found out
where env-update lived, /usr/sbin/env-update, providing the full path to
it, ran it then kicked over into another terminal, logged in and hey
presto, things are good. A reboot and this was confirmed.

	The cause - I have no idea. It now works so I'm happy. Thanks for the
suggestions people provided,

	Andrew