HELP! system no longer bootable..

tilo · n00b Joined: 21 Oct 2003 Posts: 12 Location: CA, USA

My system is unbootable and it's getting worse.. :-(

I ran into two problems (problem 2 is the more accute one)

problem 1:

I run kernel 2.4.20 SMP , and was using '~x86' setting for the emerges,
and after i rebooted the system two days ago, the boot would stop and
hang at:

"Setting up lo..." :?:

it would just hang there forever, the only way to get to the system was to
boot it into single user mode.. but I couldn't find the problem.
I noticed that "/sbin/ifconfig' was only 2 days old.. maybe that version of
ifconfig is bad? what package does it come from?

problem 2:

OK, so i tried to use the Gentoo 1.4 install CD to boot, and then chroot
to my old system on disk.. I noticed that there was a warning about
a conflict between packages
- sys-apps/sysvinit
- sys-apps/baselayout

I tried to re-emerge sysvinit

After rebooting the system is now unbootable!
it hangs during the boot with the message:

init: auto: No such filoe or directory
kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!

Great!

This is my main work machine and really need to get this fixed or have to
install a differnt distribution.. sigh..

I would greatly appreciate some help at this point..

Cartroo · n00b Joined: 04 Aug 2004 Posts: 41

Have you checked to see whether /sbin/init still exists? If not, that's your problem - if does exist, check the permissions and make sure it's executable.

I thought that init is part of the sys-apps/sysvinit package, but equery on mine claims that it's owned by baselayout. Perhaps this changed recently, which might explain the problem? I don't know, I'm pretty new to Gentoo!

Anyway, if init isn't there you could try re-emerging just sys-apps/sysvinit. If it complains, you could unemerge both the packages that conflicted and merge them again.

If init is missing and you just want to get your system bootable you can probably find a working one in the stage 3 tarball - copy it into sbin and see how you go.

Hope that's some help!

tilo · n00b Joined: 21 Oct 2003 Posts: 12 Location: CA, USA

that was a good point.. /sbin/init was gone.. so i booted with the distro-CDs
and copied it from there... but still my system hangs and dies whenever it gets to the point where it tries to initialize the loopback interface..

I tried to copy /sbin/ifconfig from the distro-CD but that didn't help..

I'm a bit clueless here.... if I try to set up the local interface manually
with ifconfig, it hangs just the same way.. sigh!!

I'm getting tired of this.. i'm thinking of installing Fedora or Slackware..

tilo · n00b Joined: 21 Oct 2003 Posts: 12 Location: CA, USA

OK, I'm finally fed-up with emerges destroying my system and with the
poorly designed process of "etc-update" ...

I'm uninstalling Gentoo and installing Fedora.. sigh!

It's a pitty that I have to use my computer as a desktop for work,
and don't have unlimited time to play around with Gentoo's quirks..

so long, and thanks for all the fish! :-)

have fun!

Tilo