Dirs disappearing (sic!) from /mnt & empty /usr after reboot

[johnnytheswede]

Hello,

I am going through the rite of passage of installation. Various troubles appear and I have started actually writing scripts to make the process of starting over more easy.

Problem 1: What I notice is that during installation, devices mounted under /mnt disappear! I cd out of /mnt/gentoo to go somewhere else and fix something, and when I come back, some directories are missing! This scenario is not uncommon:

ls under /mnt/gentoo/:

boot/
tmp/
usr/
var/
home/

ls under /mnt/gentoo/, a little while later:

var/
home/
lost+found

Where did tmp/ and boot/ go?

Problem 2: I've managed to install Gentoo. (Or so I thought ) But when I reboot, the /usr directory is totally empty! Of course init goes nuts when it wants to run all the startscripts because there are no startupscripts in /usr since usr is empty!

Weird!

I might add that I am using an automated mount-script at the beginning of each new-fresh installation. Maybe I forgot something there, however, I can run through all the installationscripts without any complaints, and I ca also edit config-files during install, so it feels things are properly mounted. Also a check with a Gentoo's gParted CD shows that the device that gets mounted on /usr actually is empty. (It's 12GB with 11.66 GB free, indicating that the only things that's there if the journal file.)

Any ideas?
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I used to be undecided, but, uhm... now I don't really know anymore

[NeddySeagoon]

johnnytheswede,

It sounds like you did the default 3 partitions, untarred the stage3 then some time later decided you wanted /usr on its own partition.
As a result, /usr is empty but mount will quite happily mount the empty partition over your working /usr dir.

You need to build the filesystem tree you want before you untar the stage3, so files end up on the right partition.

You can fix it.

Boot the CD. Mount your root partition at /mnt/gentoo, now look in /mnt/gentoo/usr to see if there are files there.
If so, mount your real /usr partition somewhere, say on /mnt/cdrom and copy the content of /mnt/gentoo/usr to /mnt/cdrom.

If /mnt/gentoo/usr is empty, you did the initial install correctly but omitted the /usr entry from /etc/fstab.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[johnnytheswede]

Thank you for your reply. However, I have taking care setting up the file-hierarchy before untarring. I believe there might be something else going on here. Here's why:

I just started my computer again to resume installation and what I usually do is to first create the tmp-dir under /mnt/gentoo. Then chmod it 1777 and mount /dev/sda6/ to it. This is where I keep my installation scripts. I went into tmp and ran my first setting-up-the-file-hierarchy script. That ran fine. I then cd:ed around to see that everything got set up as I wanted, and BAM! tmp/ was no longer mounted! . How do I know that, well, I ran ls at /mnt/gentoo, first observing that the sticky bit was no longer set on tmp (the chmod 1777 thing) then, I went into tmp and checked its contents... empty. And I just ran a script in there setting up the whole file-hierarchy!

To me it seems that I am haunted by some kind of "random unmounting of devices during install"... some enigmatic "unmounter" that lurks on me... Your comments make sense, but I believe I am seeing something else here. What do you think? (BTW my installations scripts do not touch the /mnt/gentto/tmp dir so there is nothing with the scripts unmounting the /mnt/gentoo/tmp-dir.)

/Johnny
_________________
I used to be undecided, but, uhm... now I don't really know anymore

[Mike Hunt]

Yikes poltergeist!

Have you tried without any scripts and just following the Gentoo Handbook exactly, step-by-step?

Could be worth a try.

[NeddySeagoon]

johnnytheswede,

Oh dear ...

[johnnytheswede]

It works! Many thanks! I have no more urgent needs, just a few
questions.

1. The tools I have been using to install everything are

* The minimal x86_64 Gentoo install-CD.
* Sysresccd
* gPartEd

I notice that I cannot chroot from the Sysresccd environment, which
probably means it's x86. I believe www.sysrescd.org [ edit: this was a
faulty URL, the correct one is www.sysresccd.org] says so also. But,
this CD is so good! It has gPartEd and Partition imaging (my complete
setup is now saved in a <600MB image-file that will go onto a CD soon,
so I can revert back to a working installation at any time.) But isn't
there a x86_64 version of it? (Hope so!)


2. Inspired by your advice i now mount everything in a top-down fashion.

But, I still experience that I cannot access the boot-partition, it is
not mounted after a reboot completes. I can of course access it after a
manual remount though. I have tried to rearrange the lines in /etc/fstab,
thinking that "top-down mounting is good, hence root first!", and also
putting an extra line:

/dev/sda1 /boot ext2 noauto,noatime 1 2 #Mount it goddammit!

in after everything else is mounted, but that does not help. Of course
I'm on the wrong track here. Also in all examples of /etc/fstab, the
boot-partition comes first and only once.

But maybe there is a point in that boot is not mounted during post-
boot system execution? When the system is up and running, we don't need
access to boot do we? Or is there still an error in my installation?

Could I patch that with adding a mount in some well-chosen init-script?
But that sounds artificial, isn't /etc/fstab the place to fix this in?
I have carefully read the man pages for mount and fstab but cannot
find anything that helps. However, this question is not so urgent as the
one before, I now have a working Gentoo-install and this is more of a
fine-tuning, so if you donät have so much time I understand that you
cannot reply.

Thanks again
Johnny


Here is my complete fstab:

[Hu]

[johnnytheswede]

Yes, another c in the domain-name, www.sysresccd.org is the name. (Will edit my post to add the correct link.)

And, YES , I could chroot when booting the excellent sysresccd with a 64-bit image. (I pressed F2 to see the available images.)

and, also, YES, taking away "noauto" in fstab made boot remain mounted after a reboot. (But I will probably leave it umounted in the future when I am not doing kernel work for the reasons you describe.)

This is most satisfying. Many thanks again.

I feel that I am receiving so much support from this community, is there anything I could do to support you? I could maybe be a software tester or whatever, help with upgrading handbook-formulations and such... How can I help forums.gentoo.org or other gentoo-related site?

Johnny
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I used to be undecided, but, uhm... now I don't really know anymore

[Mike Hunt]

First get your box running perfectly, then feel your way around for a while, to see where you feel suited to contribute something.
Some feel better suited do do some documentation work, others prefer helping out at bugzilla, others as arch testers and developers, and some helping users get their systems installed and working perfectly here, and there are more things that can be done.

[dE_logics]

Are you sure your HDD is ok?

Boot from a feature rich Live CD like rescueCD and -

smartctl -a <your harddrive device>

If you have Ubuntu live CD (9.04 or above), you can do it the GUI way.
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