On Wed, 17 Oct 2001 08:01, Mariusz Zielinski wrote: > > That's when things started getting weird. > > I think I also changed the kernel to include devfs & ide-cd (IDE-ATAPI > > support for my CDROM drive). > > I think the problem is devfs. It changes naming of the devices and > /dev/hda6 isn't /dev/hda6 anymore. Try booting kernel without > devfs.
If you boot with devfs and don't have the devfsd package installed then you should expect the following results: 1) No initrd: Kernel mounts the root file system fine as it does so by major/minor number not by device name (naturally as the /dev names are on the root file system they can't affect mounting root). fsck gives you an error message about being unable to check the root device and prompts you for the root password. At this stage you can remount the root FS read-write (may need to manually create a sym-link from the devfs name to the compat name), extract a copy of the devfsd package from a floppy disk, and install devfsd. After devfsd is installed everything will be fine. 2) Initrd: In this case the initrd code won't be able to mount the root FS at all. In this situation I recommend compiling a new kernel on another machine with all modules needed to mount root compiled in. Then use "rdev" to set the root device and do "cat bzImage > /dev/fd0" to make a boot floppy. After booting from such a floppy will allow you to follow proceedure 1). You MUST install devfsd if you are planning to use devfs. If you don't use devfsd then it will see that there is no devfs and do nothing (apart from wasting 100K of disk space). So there is no great reason to not have devfsd installed. -- http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/projects.html Projects I am working on http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page
