Bug 119653 – Update "system" has removed my machine's ability to see its hard-drives

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED TEST-REQUEST

[Description Vrai Stacey 2006-01-20 01:40:55 UTC]

Yesterday I did an emerge --system, it updated about twelve ebuilds but only "baselayout" stood out. After updating the /etc files the system ran fine for a few hours, with no sign of anything broken. However when I started the machine this morning I discovered that it can't see /dev/hda (and so /dev/hda3, my root partition).

Wierdly it claims to have detected the reiserfs root partion, but checkroot fails claiming it cannot repair the partion. In the root console the entire drive appears to be missing as "fdisk /dev/hda" fails with an "unknown partion" error.

If I use my old Gentoo 2004.3 CD to start the machine I can not only see /dev/hda but mount /dev/hda3 and browse around; which suggests that the drive and the partion are fine.

So something in the update system has removed my machine's ability to see /dev/hda (a 200GB ATA Seagate drive).

I have another machine that I updated at the same time and am now praying that a solution can be found before that one gets shutdown - leaving me with no usable computers.

[Comment 1 Jakub Moc (RETIRED) 2006-01-20 01:45:01 UTC]

Reopen with emerge --info, udev version and /etc/fstab

[Comment 2 Vrai Stacey 2006-01-20 02:00:15 UTC]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Reopen with emerge --info, udev version and /etc/fstab

How do I run emerge without a root partion? Doesn't it require a file system of some sorts?

Also I don't have udev installed - well, I've never explicitly installed it.

[Comment 3 Jakub Moc (RETIRED) 2006-01-20 02:04:15 UTC]

(In reply to comment #2)
> (In reply to comment #1)
> > Reopen with emerge --info, udev version and /etc/fstab
> 
> How do I run emerge without a root partion? Doesn't it require a file system of
> some sorts?

Chroot to your current system from LiveCD... 

[Comment 4 Vrai Stacey 2006-01-20 11:08:01 UTC]

As requested, my /etc/fstab ...


# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/fstab,v 1.14 2003/10/13 20:03:38 azarah Exp $
#
# noatime turns off atimes for increased performance (atimes normally aren't
# needed; notail increases performance of ReiserFS (at the expense of storage
# efficiency).  It's safe to drop the noatime options if you want and to
# switch between notail and tail freely.

# <fs>            <mountpoint>    <type>        <opts>   <dump/pass>

# NOTE: If your BOOT partition is ReiserFS, add the notail option to opts.
/dev/hda1            /boot           ext2        defaults,noatime        1 2
/dev/hda2            none            swap        sw                      0 0
/dev/hda3            /               reiserfs    noatime                 0 1

/dev/cdroms/cdrom0   /mnt/cdrom      auto        noauto,ro,user          0 0

# NOTE: The next line is critical for boot!
none                 /proc           proc        defaults                0 0

# glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for
# POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink).
# (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will
#  use almost no memory if not populated with files)
# Adding the following line to /etc/fstab should take care of this:

none                 /dev/shm        tmpfs       defaults                0 0


... and the output from emerge --info ...


Gentoo Base System version 1.6.14
Portage 2.0.53 (default-linux/x86/2005.0, gcc-3.3.6, glibc-2.3.5-r2, 2.6.9-gentoo-r1 i686)
=================================================================
System uname: 2.6.9-gentoo-r1 i686
dev-lang/python:     2.3.5-r2, 2.4.2
sys-apps/sandbox:    1.2.12
sys-devel/autoconf:  2.13, 2.59-r6
sys-devel/automake:  1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.6.3, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r1
sys-devel/binutils:  2.16.1
sys-devel/libtool:   1.5.22
virtual/os-headers:  2.6.11-r2
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86"
AUTOCLEAN="yes"
CBUILD="i386-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-O2 -mcpu=i686 -fomit-frame-pointer -march=athlon-xp -pipe"
CHOST="i386-pc-linux-gnu"
CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/share/config /var/qmail/control"
CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d"
CXXFLAGS="-O2 -mcpu=i686 -fomit-frame-pointer -march=athlon-xp -pipe"
DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles"
FEATURES="autoconfig distlocks sandbox sfperms strict"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://distfiles.gentoo.org http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/gentoo"
MAKEOPTS="-j2"
PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages"
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage"
PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage"
SYNC="rsync://engels/gentoo-portage"
USE="x86 3dnow 3dnowex X aac aalib acl alsa apache2 apm arts audiofile avi berkdb bitmap-fonts bonobo bzip2 cdparanoia cdr cpudetection crypt cscope cups curl dba directfb divx4linux dvd dvdread eds emboss encode esd ethereal exif expat fam ffmpeg flac flash foomaticdb fortran gd gdbm gif glut gnome gpm gstreamer gtk gtk2 gtkhtml guile idn imagemagick imlib ipv6 java joystick jpeg jpeg2k junit kde lcms libg++ libwww lua mad mhash mikmod ming mmx mmx2 mng motif mozsvg mp3 mpeg mysql ncurses nls nvidia offensive ogg oggvorbis opengl oss pam pcre pdflib perl php png python qt quicktime rdesktop readline recode samba scanner sdl slang spell sql sse ssl subversion svga tcltk tcpd tetex tiff truetype truetype-fonts type1-fonts udev vorbis win32codecs xine xml xml2 xmms xscreensaver xv xvid zlib userland_GNU kernel_linux elibc_glibc"
Unset:  ASFLAGS, CTARGET, LANG, LC_ALL, LDFLAGS, LINGUAS

[Comment 5 Jakub Moc (RETIRED) 2006-01-20 11:23:45 UTC]

(In reply to comment #4)
> /dev/hda3            /               reiserfs    noatime                 0 1

This is wrong, should be 0 0; see http://www.namesys.com/faq.html#fstab. If the problem still persists after fixing your fstab, then reopen with udev version (still didn't post that) and attach (don't post inline) your kernel .config.

[Comment 6 Vrai Stacey 2006-01-20 11:55:34 UTC]

Changing the dump/fsck option for / got passed checkroot, and changing it for /boot solved a subsequent checkfs issue. I'm still somewhat bemused as to why it suddenly broke after two years but it's fixed.

Thanks for your help and sorry for breaking the posting guidelines.