The first error was "Warning: unable to find a console" or something to that
effect. The boot process paused. I manually created:
crw------- 1 root root 5, 1 Sep 17 22:18 console
Then, it complained about /dev/null not being writable. Sure enough,
/dev/null was a regular file with bytes in it. *sigh* Created that as:
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 Feb 23 2004 null
No luck. Booting still had major trouble. Finally I gave up:
To get myself back into working order - I renamed /dev to /dev.udev
and copied a working /dev from another partition to /dev. It looks
like a lot of things are missing from /dev.udev. The current contents
of /dev.udev is (after I added console and null):
$ ls -l /dev.udev
total 6
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8 Dec 1 2003 cdrom -> /dev/hdc
crw------- 1 root root 5, 1 Sep 17 22:18 console
crw------- 1 root root 10, 63 Jul 31 09:16 device-mapper
crw-rw---- 1 root root 14, 9 Aug 21 00:05 dmmidi
prw------- 1 root root 0 Sep 17 22:07 initctl|
crw-r----- 1 root kmem 1, 2 Aug 28 14:13 kmem
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 2048 Jul 31 10:55 mapper/
crw------- 1 root root 14, 2 Aug 21 00:05 midi
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5 Dec 1 2003 mouse -> psaux
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 Feb 23 2004 null
crw-rw---- 1 mark root 195, 0 Jul 1 13:57 nvidia0
crw------- 1 mark root 195, 1 Jul 1 13:57 nvidia1
crw------- 1 mark root 195, 2 Jul 1 13:57 nvidia2
crw------- 1 mark root 195, 3 Jul 1 13:57 nvidia3
crw------- 1 mark root 195, 4 Jul 1 13:57 nvidia4
crw------- 1 mark root 195, 5 Jul 1 13:57 nvidia5
crw------- 1 mark root 195, 6 Jul 1 13:57 nvidia6
crw------- 1 mark root 195, 7 Jul 1 13:57 nvidia7
crw-rw---- 1 mark root 195, 255 Jul 1 13:57 nvidiactl
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root root 20 Dec 1 2003 ptal-printd -> /var/run/ptal-printd/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 2048 Jul 4 2002 pts/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 2048 Sep 6 2001 shm/
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 32 Aug 24 15:47 tty32
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 33 Aug 24 15:47 tty33
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 34 Aug 24 15:47 tty34
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 35 Aug 24 15:47 tty35
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 36 Aug 24 15:47 tty36
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 37 Aug 24 15:47 tty37
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 38 Aug 24 15:47 tty38
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 39 Aug 24 15:47 tty39
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 40 Aug 24 15:47 tty40
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 41 Aug 24 15:47 tty41
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 42 Aug 24 15:47 tty42
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 43 Aug 24 15:47 tty43
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 44 Aug 24 15:47 tty44
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 45 Aug 24 15:47 tty45
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 46 Aug 24 15:47 tty46
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 47 Aug 24 15:47 tty47
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 48 Aug 24 15:47 tty48
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 49 Aug 24 15:47 tty49
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 50 Aug 24 15:47 tty50
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 51 Aug 24 15:47 tty51
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 52 Aug 24 15:47 tty52
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 53 Aug 24 15:47 tty53
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 54 Aug 24 15:47 tty54
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 55 Aug 24 15:47 tty55
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 56 Aug 24 15:47 tty56
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 57 Aug 24 15:47 tty57
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 58 Aug 24 15:47 tty58
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 59 Aug 24 15:47 tty59
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 60 Aug 24 15:47 tty60
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 61 Aug 24 15:47 tty61
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 62 Aug 24 15:47 tty62
crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 63 Aug 24 15:47 tty63
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Aug 28 14:44 XOR -> null
Hope this helps somebody in debugging this! :-)
mark
--
mark@mielke.cc/markm@ncf.ca/markm(a)nortelnetworks.com __________________________
. . _ ._ . . .__ . . ._. .__ . . . .__ | Neighbourhood Coder
|\/| |_| |_| |/ |_ |\/| | |_ | |/ |_ |
| | | | | \ | \ |__ . | | .|. |__ |__ | \ |__ | Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them...
http://mark.mielke.cc/