/dev/sda is not found any more.

[BrummieJim]

Hi,
I have a laptop which I've been using for two years with gentoo on it. I did an emerge -uD world last saturday and now have a problem.

The machine boots fine to gdm, but when you log in you find that, there's no home directory. I looked into this a bit more and found that /dev/sda no longer existed in gentoo, even though /boot is on /dev/sda6. FYI / is on /dev/sda7, swap is on /dev/sda8 and /home is on /dev/sda9.I've since done a dispatch-conf and a revdep-rebuild, which shows the system is at least vaguely functional.

The error gentoo gives in startup is;
fsck.ext3: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/sda7
/dev/sda7:
The superblock could not be read or does not descrive a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), the the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:

I've booted the machine off a knoppix USB stick, it sees /dev/sda and I can mount home.

I've run e2fsck -b 32768 /dev/sda on the unmounted /dev/sda partition from knoppix, it found some errors, I agreed to the corrections but nothing seems to have changed.

I'm bemused how I can boot to a partition which is apparently this badly damaged, and am wondering if fsck is failing in gentoo as a result of a udev update causing the partitions to be incorrectly mounted. That would be a best case, although it cold be a screwed partition.

I'm _really_ desperate to get this solved, any advice would be greatly received.
Jim

[Akhouk]

What does

[BrummieJim]

I tried fdisk -l, displays nothing in gentoo, works perfectly in knoppix.

[Randy Andy]

Hi BrummieJim,

if fdisk doesn't show you existing device nodes, i guess i have had a similar problem at beginning of February.

Here is my solution:

You can downgrade to udev-149 and everything should work as before, but its only a workaround for me.
To fix the root cause, you have to do the following, not sure if only if you are working with the 2.6.32xx kernel branch:

Into the kernel config you have to deselcet the deprecated option under general setup called CONFIG_SYSFS "deprecated sysfs features which may confuse old userspace tools" and eventuelly CONFIG_SYS (2) found under /file-system/pseudo-filesystems

Than udev-151 (latest version i guess) works also fine for me.

Regards, Andy.
_________________
If you want to see a Distro done right, compile it yourself!

[BrummieJim]

Hi,
I was praying it was something like that. I'll do that tonigh, and let you know how it goes.

[d2_racing]

I had that problem too and there is a bugzilla about that too

[aspedisca]

[d2_racing]

In fact, I don't see it anymore.

I will double check.

[BrummieJim]

Can confirm downgrading works, went to the stable 146-r1 version.

Thanks for all your help and if you're having this problem, I hope the thread helps.

[VoidMage]

[Randy Andy]

Yepp,

as i told in my post above, downgrading udev is just a workaround - no solution.
To fix it, you have to change your kernel config, as i mentioned above.

One old Bug-report regarding this you can found here, for clarification. (until d2_racing found the link he mentioned )


https://bugs.gentoo.org/225249


Andy.
_________________
If you want to see a Distro done right, compile it yourself!

[samo]

I have a similar problem with udev-146-r1. The root device /dev/sda3 could not be found at startup.

I'm running linux-2.6.31-gentoo-r9 with the following options:

[VoidMage]

No, those options look fine. You may need to add 'root=/dev/sda3' to grub kernel parameters.

[samo]

The parameter is already there

[samo]

My problem was solved here