Kernel loads, but boot process does not continue

[tjscollins]

I have a bizarre problem that I have never seen before. Just finished installing Gentoo on a new laptop and it does not boot and gives no apparent error messages.

The kernel loads fine, detects the hard drive, mounts the root partition, detects my wifi chip, usb peripherals etc., and then just stops. The boot scripts never start.

Any ideas?

[The Doctor]

Well, it might help to see the problem...
_________________
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

[tjscollins]

There were no error messages logged to post, but I figured it out.

Turned out I used one of the bad stage3 tarballs (an old one from last fall) that didn't have /dev populated correctly (only had /dev/null, not /dev/console or /dev/zero) so udev couldn't fill the rest of /dev out. Once I fixed that the system booted.