New installation doesn't *quite* boot

dkasak · n00b Joined: 10 Feb 2012 Posts: 61

Hi all.

I'm a long-term Gentoo user, currently migrating a laptop from Sabayon to Gentoo ( I needed to get installed on a laptop *immediately* ). My installation method is slightly non-standard, but should have worked:

1) Make a /mnt/gentoo directory inside an running Sabayon system.
2) Continue installation as if /mnt/gentoo is a mounted partition ... ie mount proc, sys, dev, etc into /mnt/gentoo, chroot into it, configure, and emerge @world - following the additional instructions for systemd. I'm pretty OK with the whole process.
3) Reboot from a USB disk
4) Mount old Sabayon partition
5) Move everything from / into /sabayon
6) Move everything from /sabayon/mnt/gentoo into /
7) Unmount and reboot

I shouldn't have to touch my grub setup.

So when I reboot and select a kernel, I get the Sabayon boot splash screen ( custom kernel built with genkernel-next ), and the boot progress bar *slowly* moves. This laptop has an SSD, so it should be basically instant. Booting then appears to hang.

If I hit CTRL-ALT-F2, I can log in as root, but not much is working. systemd appears totally non-functional. I can't start any services or get the status of any services - they all say the command exited with an unknown error. If I try journalctl, it says there are no logs. I can start X ( I built gnome in the chroot environment ), but the keyboard and mouse are non-functional, and gnome doesn't start - I get a dialog asking for my password to unlock my keyring, and I'm stuck there.

If I instead hit Enter ( ie instead of CTRL-ALT-F2 ), there's a message saying login failed, and asking for my root password for maintenance. I can log in - but again, can't do much. If I hit CTRL-D to 'continue', the system appears to hang.

If I boot without the 'quite' and 'splash' options in grub, I can see that most boot services appear to be starting correctly - other than boot.mount or mount.boot or something ( which I assume is not critical ). Nothing else stands out. The last messages logged to the console are kernel messages about setting up bluetooth. Nothing is being logged to /var/log. Nothing appears to be wrong in dmesg output.

Does anyone know what's gone wrong? How can I diagnose this?

Luckily I can switch back to the 'working' ( entropy died, which is another story ) Sabayon installation by switching around the directories I changed in steps 5) and 6) ...

DawgG · l33t Joined: 17 Sep 2003 Posts: 866

check the perms of / (i did a similar thing once and they were wrong (had done everything as root before) and nobody but root could log in because of this).
is your directory-structure really functional and everything mounted (/etc/fstab)?
have you added all the necessary services with rc-update (or whatever systemd's cmd is) inside the chroot (boot.mount might be quite important)?
if you use btrfs you could use two different installations in different subvols - might make some stuff easier.
GOOD LUCK!
_________________
DUMM KLICKT GUT.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2017 8:03 pm Post subject:

dkasak,

Do you have identical kernels built with identical versions of gcc in Sabyon and Gentoo?

If not the Gentoo and Sabayon kernel modules in /lib/modules will differ and the kernel will refuse to load them.
Look in dmesg for version magic errors.

If you want to use the same kernel in both places, you need to copy /lib/modules/`uname -r`/ from sabyon to gentoo.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

dkasak · n00b Joined: 10 Feb 2012 Posts: 61

dkasak · n00b Joined: 10 Feb 2012 Posts: 61

DawgG · l33t Joined: 17 Sep 2003 Posts: 866

i'd compile a kernel in the gentoo-system just to make sure (and then maybe recompile and reconfigure systemd).
if you can login and (manually) run the programs of the services systemd can't/won't start i'd say it's definitely a systemd-problem (but i do not use systemd so i don't know any specifics)
GOOD LUCK!
_________________
DUMM KLICKT GUT.

dkasak · n00b Joined: 10 Feb 2012 Posts: 61

Thanks everyone for the tips. I've gotten things working

It turned out to be an issue with mounting /boot, which apparently puts the system in 'emergency' mode. It was very helpful to do the following to my grub kernel command line:

- remove 'splash'
- remove 'quiet'
- add systemd.dump_core=true
- add systemd.log_level=debug
- add systemd.log_target=kmsg

Anyway, I had *changed* the entry in /etc/fstab for /boot ... for some reason. It was late - I'm not sure what I was thinking.[/list]

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2017 9:03 am Post subject:

dkasak,

/boot is not needed to be mounted to boot the system.
Everything that is needed from /boot is read before the kernel is initialised, so /boot is not normally mounted in Gentoo.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

dkasak · n00b Joined: 10 Feb 2012 Posts: 61

I absolutely guarantee you that fixing my /etc/fstab solved my issue.

The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

Sorry to jump in at the 11th hour with this, but from experience if you know what you are doing you can just use portage to remove the Sabayon overlay and all packages installed from the overlay, update, and run. However, again from experience, this process takes about as long as installing Gentoo from a stage3. I tried it to see if I could do it

And if I may suggest that the cause of the mysterious fix that shouldn't have worked is likely the result of Systemd trying to do too much.
_________________
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.