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fsociety3765
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 28, 2021 4:08 pm    Post subject: Block device is not a valid root device... Gentoo Noob Reply with quote

Hi all,

I am a first-time Gentoo user. Although I followed the handbook, I must have done something stupid as my installation with not boot.

After completing the handbook and rebooting I am getting an error saying:

Code:

Block device UUID=ae865e4c-9079-4ac1-8a4f-ccec5e822663 is not a valid root device...
Could not find the root block device in UUID=ae865e4c-9079-4ac1-8a4f-ccec5e822b63.
Please specify another value or:
- press Enter for the same
- type "shell" for a shell
- type "q" to skip
root block device(UUID=ae865e4c-9079-4ac1-8a4f-ccec5e822b63) ::


Do I need to boot back into the Gentoo installation ISO to troubleshoot this? Any ideas what the issue could be? I'm hoping it's solvable.

I should also mention that I am installing Gentoo inside a VMware Fusion virtual machine on a Mac. The virtual disk type is NVMe. For the installation I went with OpenRC, BTRFS as the rootfs, and Grub bootloader.

Thanks in advance,

FS
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NeddySeagoon
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 28, 2021 4:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

fsociety3765,

Welcome to Gentoo.

I doubt that you have done anything stupid. You have just encountered your first Gentoo learning opportunity because you lack experience.
Experience is what you get just after you needed it. :)

Using UUID to specify your root device to the kernel requires that you have an initrd as the kernel does not understand UUID.
Rather it depends on the user space mount command to do that.
The initrd is a small get-you-going temporary root filesystem that breaks the circular dependency of needing root to be mounted to use a user space tool to mount root to read a user space tool.

You can troubleshoot in the shell. That that is an option tells that you have an initrd.
Get back to
Code:
Please specify another value or:
- press Enter for the same
- type "shell" for a shell
- type "q" to skip
root block device(UUID=ae865e4c-9079-4ac1-8a4f-ccec5e822b63) ::
and
Code:
- type "shell" for a shell

Now you have a busybox shell and lots of cut down commands for diagnostics.

Does
Code:
ls /proc
show lots or nothing?
The same for
Code:
ls /dev

Your root device should appear by its block device name in /dev.
Code:
ls /dev/sd*
should show it unless its a nvme device, then its
Code:
ls /dev/nvm*


Some other things to post to help us help you.
Back on the liveCD,
Code:
lspci -nnk
will tell us about your hardware.

Tell us how you partitioned your drive(s)
Code:
fdisk -l


From the liveCD, mount your Gentoo partitions but do not chroot.
Post the output of
Code:
blkid


Did you do a normal install or did you use LUKS, Raid or LVM?
You would know if you did.

wgetpaste can help you share the things I have asked for. It puts file content or command output on the web, so you only need share the link.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.
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fsociety3765
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 28, 2021 5:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi, thanks for your assistance.

Code:
ls /proc

Returns a lot a stuff.

Code:
ls /dev

Returns a lot of stuff.

Code:
ls /dev/nvm*

Returns, no such file or directory. That's concerning.

Code:
lspci -nnk

Returns:
https://dpaste.com/8PNK3QX26

Code:
fidsk -l

Returns:
https://dpaste.com/92HZ8UPFE

I will need to refer back to the handbook to refresh my memory on mounting the partitions again. I will come back to you with that info.

Thanks,

FS
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fsociety3765
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 28, 2021 5:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Side note.

That wgetpaste tool is awesome. Is that a Gentoo-only thing?
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Hu
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 28, 2021 7:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

wgetpaste is a wrapper around wget, which knows how to invoke it to use various popular pastebin sites. I don't know whether other distributions provide a package to install it, but they could if they wanted to. The package is MIT licensed, and every non-embedded distribution is likely to have wget installed.
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NeddySeagoon
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 28, 2021 8:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

fsociety3765,

Code:
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 128 GiB, 137438953472 bytes, 268435456 sectors
Disk model: VMware Virtual NVMe Disk
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: BCFE5C8F-DF9C-C347-8253-AAE7E12D8191

Device            Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1     2048    526335    524288   256M EFI System
/dev/nvme0n1p2   526336  17303551  16777216     8G Linux swap
/dev/nvme0n1p3 17303552 268435422 251131871 119.7G Linux filesystem


That says that your root will be on /dev/nvme0n1p3.
As you say, not having that in /dev is a problem.

You have quite a selection of storage devices.
Code:
00:07.1 IDE interface [0101]: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE [8086:7111] (rev 01)
   Subsystem: VMware Virtual Machine Chipset [15ad:1976]
   Kernel driver in use: ata_piix
   Kernel modules: ata_piix, pata_acpi, ata_generic

00:10.0 SCSI storage controller [0100]: Broadcom / LSI 53c1030 PCI-X Fusion-MPT Dual Ultra320 SCSI [1000:0030] (rev 01)
   Subsystem: VMware LSI Logic Parallel SCSI Controller [15ad:1976]
   Kernel driver in use: mptspi
   Kernel modules: mptspi

02:05.0 SATA controller [0106]: VMware SATA AHCI controller [15ad:07e0]
   DeviceName: sata0
   Subsystem: VMware SATA AHCI controller [15ad:07e0]
   Kernel driver in use: ahci
   Kernel modules: ahci

0b:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller [0108]: VMware Device [15ad:07f0]
   DeviceName: nvme0
   Subsystem: VMware Device [15ad:07f0]
   Kernel driver in use: nvme
   Kernel modules: nvme

but your kernel is missing support for the one your root filesystem is on.

They are all faked by the hypervisor. Unless your ace doing physical device pass through, so the guest has access to the real hardware, there is noting to choose between them.
You can just move to file the holds your guest gentoo install to a different device.
That means updating /etc/fstab in the guest too.

The other way forward is to build nvme support for your kernel.
Get back into your chroot, fix your kernel, reinstall it and reboot the guest to test.
The initrd will need to be rebuilt too.

-- edit --

The wgetpaste package installs
Code:
$ equery f wgetpaste
 * Searching for wgetpaste ...
 * Contents of app-text/wgetpaste-2.32:
/usr
/usr/bin
/usr/bin/wgetpaste
/usr/share
/usr/share/zsh
/usr/share/zsh/site-functions
/usr/share/zsh/site-functions/_wgetpaste

So you only need the /usr/bin/wgetpaste file to try it on other systems.

The header says
Code:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# A Script that automates pasting to a number of pastebin services
# relying only on bash, sed, coreutils (mktemp/sort/tr/wc/whoami/tee) and wget
# Copyright (c) 2007-2016 Bo Ørsted Andresen <email removed>

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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.
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fsociety3765
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 29, 2021 4:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

OK, made some progress.

chrooted back in and reconfigured the kernel to add NVMe support. I also updated /etc/fstab to reference the UUID's for each partition rather than /dev/nvme0n1 etc... The UUID approach seems more explicit.

Seems to have done the trick as it's now booting as far as a Gentoo login prompt. I do get one error saying that "eth0" doesn't exist but I remember reading about that potentially popping up if my interface was something. I don't see that as a show-stopping issue right now.

The main issue I have now is I cannot log in as the key mapping for my keyboard is totally messed up. During the configuration, I set all my locales correctly for GB and set the keymapping to mac-uk. I can see that is what is being loaded but the keymappings are so out I am unable to type what I want.

Any advice at this stage? I'm guessing back into the live ISO and reconfigure to a different keymapping?

Thanks again for your help thus far.

FS
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pietinger
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 29, 2021 5:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

fsociety3765 wrote:
I'm guessing back into the live ISO and reconfigure to a different keymapping?

This should not be necessary.

fsociety3765 wrote:
The main issue I have now is I cannot log in as the key mapping for my keyboard is totally messed up. During the configuration, I set all my locales correctly for GB [...]

Maybe you forgot to do an "locale-gen" ? (see more here: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Localization/Guide)

This is all I have to do (for my german layout):
Code:
# nano -w /etc/locale.gen
=> de_DE.UTF-8 UTF-8
# locale-gen
# nano -w /etc/keymaps
=> KEYMAP="de"


fsociety3765 wrote:
[...] and set the keymapping to mac-uk.

Sorry, this I dont know and I cant find it in /usr/share/keymaps/i386/qwerty (or any other folder in /usr/share/keymaps/i386/)
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NeddySeagoon
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 29, 2021 6:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

fsociety3765,

The default console keymap is us.
The virtualisation system can mangle the key mapping beyond all recognition.

Editing /etc/conf.d/keymaps may not be enough.
Code:
# Use keymap to specify the default console keymap.  There is a complete tree
# of keymaps in /usr/share/keymaps to choose from.
# keymap="uk"

keymap="dvorak-uk"


You may need to fiddle with your virtualiser too.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.
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fsociety3765
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 29, 2021 10:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

OK. I changed it to just "uk" for the keymap and the keyboard is working as expected now. I have been able to login as root and create a daily user account.

Dumb question....? During the install, the profile I had selected was for the Gnome desktop variant. At the minute I am just being logged into a bash shell. Is this correct at this point? Is there more to do to get a desktop environment installed now?

I have fixed the network interface issue I had now too.

Thanks,

FS
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NeddySeagoon
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 29, 2021 10:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

fsociety3765,

That's correct.

The basic install can do little more than build software.
The selected profile sets a default set of USE flags to help you build you Gentoo the way you want to.

You can override theses settings in make.conf.

Gentoo gives you two things.
1. The packages you explicitly select.
2. The packages required to support the packages you explicitly select.

The converse is mostly true too. If you didn't install its, you don't have it.

There is a guide for Gnome on the wiki.

Oh, the only dumb question is the one you never ask as you will never know the answer :)
Be on you guard for dumb answers though.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
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fsociety3765
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 29, 2021 11:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Perfect thank you. I will take a look at the Gnome Wiki.

I have installed "doas" and "htop" so far. I have "doas" set up to permit the wheel group to which I added my user account. Seems to be working although I also added the persist flag in the config so you get the 5 minutes timeout between having to re-enter the password and that part doesn't seem to be working yet. May need to restart something. Will have to have a play with that.

One thing I am struggling with now is my text editor. Nano is OK, but I am a Vim user. I am trying to install Neovim but getting some warnings about "USE changes" being required to proceed. It asks me if I want to add these changes to my config file, to which I say yes. But it doesn't do the install.

I am now trying to install regular Vim which seems to be working. Perhaps that needs to be installed prior to Neovim? Standard Vim will do for now. I'll take that. Haha.

FS
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NeddySeagoon
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 29, 2021 11:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

fsociety3765,

The changes are written to temporary files.

Gentoo will not automatically apply any updates to the locations in CONFIG_PROTECT= or CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK=
To actually apply the updates run etc-update or dispatch-conf.
Look at the output of
Code:
emerge --info
to see what is protected.

This makes sure that your system is not modified without your knowledge and consent.
Warning: Do not blindly allow all. Its a verybadthing to reset all your configuration files to their default values, so sometimes there are proposed changes that you want to throw away.

Requiring to manually install vim before neovim would be a bug in the neovim ebuild.
Ebuilds must list all the things they depend on except the @system set, which is always assumed to be installed.
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