newbie help - can't reboot after new install [SOLVED]

arjay1 · n00b Joined: 24 Aug 2005 Posts: 57 Location: Coin, Spain

Hi all. I'm relatively new to linux but have a successful debian installation on my three computer home network (just for the last couple of months). I thought I would give gentoo a try and installed it on my master hard disk on one of the computers, replacing a dual boot with win xp. I have Debian installed on a second disk in the same computer.

I followed the installation guide pretty faithfully (I thought) with a stage 2 install. When it came to the first reboot, I got the boot error message "can't find the kernel". I presume I have possibly mistyped something in the grub.conf file.

All I got was a very garbled GUI screen with dozens of faint lines down it, making it impossible to read whatever is on it.

I rebooted using the live cd and chose a default boot. I got to the live cd prompt but not sure how to get to my own installation. I tried the instructions in the guide:

chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash
env-update
source /etc/profile

but never got further than the chroot command which just comes up with "can't find bin/bash - no such file or directory".

Can someone put me straight?

TIA

SinoTech · Posted: Fri Aug 26, 2005 2:40 pm Post subject:

Have you mount your root partition to "/mnt/gentoo" first ? If not, the directory you want to chroot to is empty and therefore is won't work

.

Mfg

Sino

arjay1 · n00b Joined: 24 Aug 2005 Posts: 57 Location: Coin, Spain

SinoTech - thanks for replying so quickly

Could you spell out the CLI command for this please? I though I had but maybe i need to see a correct version first!!

Thnx

SinoTech · Posted: Fri Aug 26, 2005 2:47 pm Post subject:

To mount your partition you've to use the following command:

arjay1 · n00b Joined: 24 Aug 2005 Posts: 57 Location: Coin, Spain

Thanks buddy - I'm off down into the basement to see if that helps. i also saw a specimen grub.conf on this forum and it looks like i am missing an initrd line. I'll check that too.

Regards

Richard

arjay1 · n00b Joined: 24 Aug 2005 Posts: 57 Location: Coin, Spain

Yup that was the help I needed - thanks. However, I seemed to have a few missing files so I started with a fresh install.

EDIT: do you know how I edit the subject title to mark it up as SOLVED? Ta

nixnut · Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2005 11:46 am Post subject:

SinoTech · Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2005 11:48 am Post subject:

arjay1 · n00b Joined: 24 Aug 2005 Posts: 57 Location: Coin, Spain

nixnut - thanks for responding. Actually, I chrooted back into my environment but couldn't find the grub.conf file I thought I had created, as well as some other stuff. It was complaining it couldn't find the specified kernel and goodness knows what else. So I abandoned the install and tried again.

Everything went fine until I got stuck after the kernel compile. [I have just posted a request for help with this in this forum if you can help].

Thanks for the tip on editing the title. I'll mark this up as solved to save anyone wasting anymore time on it.

Great forum, by the way. Fast and helpful responses - nice people - what more could you ask. :wink: