Andrew Lowe <a...@wht.com.au> [16-01-30 16:16]: > Hi all, > I have an ARM device that I have Gentoo on. In the past I had it > successfully running and then one day I managed to "customise" something > and I could no longer get it to boot. At the time I though "I'll have to > fix that...". Today I'm trying. > > The machine in question operates as a small server hence runs headless. > For the work at hand, I've attached it to the TV hence everything is in > text mode, no X. > > When it boots, I'm presented with the login prompt. I enter "root", the > password & enter. The screen flashes, a frame by frame viewing of a > video of this shows that it's printing the last time I logged in and > then am represented with the login again. This just repeats. I though > that I had forgotten the root password hence accessed the disk via > another machine, reset things in the shadow file and rebooted. Once > again the screen flashed, with the same output, and I was presented with > the login prompt again. > > Any thought on what could be going wrong here? I've ensured all the > files that should be owned by root are owned by root - I think. Logging > appears not to be working so I can't get much from that. I'm 99.99% sure > this is not an ARM specific problem as the machine was running perfectly > beforehand. > > Any thoughts greatly appreciated, > > Andrew >
Hi Andrew, things which came into my mind (in no specific order): - default shell wrongly set - $HOME points to Shangrila - fstab corrupted so that vital parts of the root tree get not correctly mounted on tmpfs like /var, /tmp and such. Does this ARM system has an UART, which spits out the whole boot process and more so there may be a chance to get closer to any informations (error logs etc)? Fingers crossed! Good luck! Meino
