On Saturday 28 November 2009 18:31:04 BRM wrote: > ----- Original Message ---- > > From: Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> > > > On Saturday 28 November 2009 17:04:10 BRM wrote: > > > > You also mention /dev/hda and the context implies it is a physical > > > > disk. Unless you have ancient disk hardware and unusual module setup, > > > > your disks will be /dev/sda. Do you have references to /dev/dh** in > > > > /etc/fstab? That won;t work as udev will not name them that way > > > > > > Actually, yes - it is a 2003 Dell D600 with a standard ATA/IDE hard > > > drive. So yes - it would be /dev/hda; and yes, udev has been working > > > fine until this issue. > > > > For quite some time now IDE drives have been handled below the SCSI > > subsytem so you do in fact get a /dev/sda, except when using the old > > deprectaed IDE driver that has been around for ages. That one uses > > /dev/hda, and it's very unusual these days to find it. > > You should check what the kernek you are running is using and what udev > > calls those things as it very likely is not the same as what it was > > before your kernel & udev upgrade. > > Okay - booted back over to it to do some checking: > > - trying to use /dev/sda1 as the root device (kernel command-line) won't > work. - exact kernel version: 2.6.25-gentoo-r7 > - there are no drives (hda, sda, etc.) listed under /dev - kind of expected > since udevd isn't running. > > I do have sources for linux kernel 2.6.30-gentoo-r8 available, but then I > need to be able to write to the read-only fs. Guess I could probably do > that using the kernel command-line, no? (Haven't done that before, so I'm > not sure what the correct option would be.)
Before these troubles started, did you build a 2.6.30 kernel? If so, you can just boot it, editing the grub command line at boot time as necessary. If not, fixing it is quite trivially easy: Get a copy of any recent liveCD or rescue image that you can boot, and boot into it. It will find your drives using whatever conventions it uses, and let you mount your gentoo partitions just like you would do with installs. chroot lets you test stuff and you can also use the compiler on the rescue disk to build a new kernel and store it in /boot Then boot into that new kernel, everything ought to start properly, and immediately rebuild that kernel using your gentoo system compiler. Along the way you might have to edit your fstab to use sda devices instead of hda ones. btw, this is exactly the reason why user-oriented distros like Ubuntu mount system partitions using the fs GUID, not the kernel device name. It gets around this kind of trouble quite elegantly -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
