I executed rm /dev/sda* as root...

[Shining Arcanine]

I installed Gentoo Linux on a VMWare Player virtual machine on my laptop (x86).

I followed the handbook fairly well until I had to install LILO. I was half asleep at this time and deleted /dev/sda* as root in my chrooted environment. I tried rebooting into Linux (as I had just finished installing it) and I am receiving the error "VFS: Cannot open root device "803" or unknown block(8,3)".

It also says "Please append a correct "root=" option; here are the available partitions:", with the only thing following it being "0b00 1048575 sr0 driver: sr", which does not appear to be a partition to me. It then continues to talk about kernel panic.

I installed a virtual machine on my desktop and it turned out that the minimal install CD I was using was using /dev/hda while my installation used /dev/sda, so without thinking, I tried symlinking /dev/hda to /dev/sda (with the corresponding partitions being symlinked too), without realizing that the LiveDVD that I was using used /dev/sda by default. A long story short, I seem to have damaged my MBR before even being able to boot my system. I have went into the LiveDVD again, re-established the chroot environment and ran /sbin/lilo without any complaints from it (which is something I could not do after goofing on the original LiveDVD session).

Could someone please advise me on what to do? The only solution I can think of that I did not try is to start from scratch, but I would prefer to fix my mistake over recompiling the virtual machine for more than a day.

[Mike Hunt]

It would probably be better to start over, and if your experimentations fail again, then start over again. Trying all kinds of installation techniques is one of the fun things that can be done with Gentoo that isn't really doable with any other OS.

When all else fails, follow the Gentoo Handbook, and you'll be fine.

Have fun.

[Hu]

Starting from scratch is overkill, and probably not very fun when working with the reduced computing power of a virtual machine running on a laptop.

sr is the optical drive. Your problem is unrelated to your deletion of the device nodes. Modern Linux systems typically use a dynamic /dev, so rebooting repopulates the /dev directory. Your problem is that you omitted kernel support for your hard drive. Boot the LiveDVD and run lspci -k to find the name of the kernel driver for your hard drive.

[Mike Hunt]

Ok, I didn't realize that rm /dev/sda* only removes the device nodes and not the contents of the drive. So of course there is no need to start over.

[Hu]

Right. If he had written anything to any of those device nodes first, the data would have gone onto his drive and potentially caused massive corruption. Simply deleting the device node is quick and safe, but it is not useful.

[Shining Arcanine]

[Mike Hunt]

[Shining Arcanine]