Can't find /etc/inittab

Paladin21 · n00b Joined: 13 Jun 2002 Posts: 9

For various reasons, I have my /etc mounted on a seperate partition from the root. When I try to boot up into Gentoo, I get a "Can't find /etc/inittab" error and it asks me for the run level. I have searched aoround in this forum and a few others, but haven't found anything that I believe applies to my situation. Is there some way (via GRUB perhaps?) to make the /etc partition mount first so that when root mounts it will pick up the scripts? Could I symlink something on root to the /etc partition? I am not sure how to approach this problem. Sorry to sound so lost, but I am at work, and when I get home I will not have internet access, so I need to figure out a plan of attack ASAP. Thanks for any help.

klieber · Posted: Fri Jun 21, 2002 4:02 pm Post subject: Re: Can't find /etc/inittab

Paladin21 · n00b Joined: 13 Jun 2002 Posts: 9

Thanks for the help. Unfortunately, I already tried that. The /etc partition mounting is the second line in the fstab file (right after /boot but before /). To clarify my problem, GRUB is loading the / directory fine. The problem is, the / will not pull /etc off of a different partition (apparently). It can't see /etc/fstab or /etc/inittab, it is just the inittab that craps out first. I need some way to have the / (md0) call and mount /etc from a different partition (hde2) so that it can then read /etc/fstab and /etc/inittab. I thought perhaps I might symlink something to the /etc/fstab so that it would pick up and mount everything else, but am unsure how to go about this. Any suggestions?

delta407 · Posted: Fri Jun 21, 2002 5:33 pm Post subject:

Well, one option might be to:

Paladin21 · n00b Joined: 13 Jun 2002 Posts: 9

Is the rc.init file executed before or after it tries to find /etc/fstab and /etc/inittab? If it is, I guess I could do something like:

<code>
mkdir /etc
mount /dev/hde2 /etc
</code>

And then just leave mounting /etc out of the fstab file (since it would already be mounted). Can I do that? Or would it need to be done somwhere other than in rc.init? Could I make a shell script of it and pass it through GRUB somehow? Again, thanks for the help, I really have to get things ironed out so I will know what to try when I get home to my semi-functional gentoo box. (i.e. I can boot from CD and manually start everything, just not let it post up by itself).

delta407 · Posted: Fri Jun 21, 2002 6:14 pm Post subject:

I haven't dug around in Gentoo's startup scripts, but best of luck.

ialtywu · n00b Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 25

I may be wrong in this, but I believe that /etc has to be part of the root partition and not on it's own, the system doesn't know what to do with itself without /etc, and without it mounted it can't mount other filesystems or do much of anything else for that matter.

What is your reason for wanting /etc as a separate partition?

Paladin21 · n00b Joined: 13 Jun 2002 Posts: 9

I was trying to put the whole system (other than /boot and the swap) on one big software RAID array. I hit a problem with the RAID not being able to start because the /etc/raidtab file was ON the raid array. Sort of a chicken-and-egg thing, I suppose. I wanted to mount the RAID drives to have access to the system, but needed access to the system to get the file to mount the RAID. If /etc has to be on root, is there any way to get the RAID array to build at startup so that it is mountable?

delta407 · Posted: Fri Jun 21, 2002 6:43 pm Post subject:

Probably.

Off the top of my head, you could use an initrd to do the necessary things with the RAID array and hand off control to the rest of the startup scripts. There are, of course, other ways of doing this... oh, hey, someone was doing this with firewire disks in the PPC forum.

ialtywu · n00b Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 25