Fails to boot: Failed to calculate module dependencies

[samuel.penn]

I've had an Gentoo/AMD64 system[1] that has been running fine since the last reboot back around Xmas time. I shut it down last night cleanly, and have just tried to boot it back, but I get a:

"Failed to calculate module dependencies"

It then fails to mount any filesystems, claiming that they are corrupt.

I'm using SATA, with ext2 for the boot partition and resier for everything else, though since I can mount all the filesystems fine in Knoppix I don't think this is a problem.

I've tried booting from the Gentoo install CD I used to build the system (2004.3 AMD64), but it can't even see any of the /dev/sda* drives in order to mount them. Knoppix can see them fine.

I'm pretty certain I haven't changed the kernel in the last month or so, but obviously all sorts of things have been upgraded since the last reboot.

Any ideas? This is somewhat... um, fatal



[1] Hardware specs at http://www.glendale.org.uk/~sam/amd64.html

[samuel.penn]

I have managed to get the system up and running, but things still aren't quite right.

Though none of the /dev/sd* devices existed, I managed to find my drives under /dev/scsi/host2/bus0/target0/lun0, and was able to mount /boot and /etc

I noticed that /etc/modules.conf had zero size, so I ran "modules-update -force" from single user mode to try and regenerate it. This regenerated the file, though failed to read System.map since /usr wasn't mounted.

I rebooted and it now finds the module dependencies, but fails to mount any drives, because /dev/sd* still don't exist. Back in single user mode, I changed fstab (which gave me another reminder to make a /bin/vim version of vim, so I don't have to use nano in these circumstances) to point directly at the devices in /dev/scsi (as above).

Rebooted, and the system came up, though with errors about not being able to find the oss sound devices. The SATA devices in /dev/sda* now exist at this point once the full system is up, even though they aren't there at boot time.

So... anyone any idea why all my devices and modules broke? Any idea why some devices don't exist at boot time?

[jomen]