[plug] problem booting

[Craig Ringer]

On Thu, 2004-01-29 at 20:12, David & Lisa Buddrige wrote:
> I managed to boot into a simple shell by using the "linux init=/bin/bash"
> option at the lilo prompt.  I then attempted to find out what was going on
> in /etc.... here is a transcript of my attempt:

OK, as Cameron suggested before, you should make sure to start devfsd
and mount /proc before continuing.

# /sbin/devfsd
# mount -t proc proc /proc

> So I think to myself... ugh... not good.... where's my devices gone?   Is
> this a Mandrake thing?

Sort of. devfsd hasn't started or isn't working properly - perhaps it
couldn't read it's config file out of your maybe-broken /etc, or maybe
you forgot to start it.

>   In RH /dev/fd0 was always the floppy but there does
> not seem to be such a thing in my /dev

I think it's probably there, just named differently. Try looking around
under /dev/disks and /dev/misc .

> has anyone seen this sort of thing before?

Yup; a failing hard disk caused corruption to critical parts of the
filesystem. The corruption wasn't detected until it was so bad that I
was unable to recover significant parts of the filesystem. Backups are a
very good thing.

Craig Ringer