improper mounting on boot

vanpelt · n00b Joined: 17 Sep 2002 Posts: 22 Location: San Diego

I just decided to reinstall my copy of Gentoo. I decided this partly because my previous copy wasn't functioning properly, and partly because of the excitment. Anyway, I just finished the install and rebooted, when I was greeted with problems.

I have about 6 partitions that are mounted during boot: root, usr, home, temp, and a couple storage drives. All of these partitions are different sizes. The problem is that it dosen't seem to mount any partitions but the root. When I login, it complains of not being able to find "whoami" and other programs that would be in /usr (I can't run "less" or "emerge" etc.).

When I run a "df -h", it shows all of my partitions but it says that they are all the same size with the same amount used. If I try and unmount a partition, it says that it isn't mounted, but when I re-mount it it works fine. It shows up in "df -h", and I can see the files with "ls".

Here's the kicker, my system was showing these same symptoms before I decided to re-install Gentoo. An fsck doesn't bring up any errors in the drive. The system just started acting like this out of the blue. It is un-related to any ebuild update, as I hadn't updated my system in over a couple months.

I'm really lost on this one, any ideas?
_________________
Curiousity killed the cat but I was a prime suspect.
-Steven Wright

mike4148 · l33t Joined: 09 Sep 2003 Posts: 641

Post the contents of /etc/fstab.

vanpelt · n00b Joined: 17 Sep 2002 Posts: 22 Location: San Diego

fstab is fine, I'm using the same one that worked for me for 6 months. The drive are "/dev/hda5 / noatime 0 1" etc.
_________________
Curiousity killed the cat but I was a prime suspect.
-Steven Wright

vanpelt · n00b Joined: 17 Sep 2002 Posts: 22 Location: San Diego

Here is my fstab, but I'm really stumped on this one.

mike4148 · l33t Joined: 09 Sep 2003 Posts: 641

After you're logged in to your system, try running

vanpelt · n00b Joined: 17 Sep 2002 Posts: 22 Location: San Diego

Well, I was having these problems until I reverted to a kernel which I thought I had tryed before with the same results, but it worked. Now, however the problem is back! I re-compiled my kernel and the problem once again reared it's ugly head. I think it may have something to do with the initial initrd mounting. I tryed to enable it to allow for bootsplashing, and that's when the problem came back. mount -a does nothing. I figure I'll try to compile again without initrd support, and I'll see where I'm at. If that doesn't work I'll try the vanilla-sources. Does anyone else have an idea?
_________________
Curiousity killed the cat but I was a prime suspect.
-Steven Wright

vanpelt · n00b Joined: 17 Sep 2002 Posts: 22 Location: San Diego

Well, I recompiled my kernel without initrd support and it booted on my next attempt fine. I booted into KDE and tryed to restart X "ctrl + alt + backspace" and my system froze. I than rebooted the machine manually and on the next boot the same problem was there. My next step was to mount "/usr" so that I could apply a clean reboot with "shutdown -r now", vwalla it was working allright again. So, my problem is not initrd, but instead has to do with an improper shutdown. I've never noticed this before. Is this common? wierd
_________________
Curiousity killed the cat but I was a prime suspect.
-Steven Wright