[vox-tech] bootloader + installed but not-running udev = iniquity?

[Bryan Richter]

Hi,

While I have done a lot of things to my computer in the last two days, I can
think of nothing that explains the following. lilo and grub BOTH freeze when
they try to write their first stage to a boot sector. As the title of this email
suggests, I would hazard a guess that installing udev had a part to play. 

I have been toying with my new Neuros, and since USB MSD support is apparently
different in kernel 2.6.9 than in most documentation I've found, I had to shoot
in the dark a little. I finally realized I need the ub module, which creates
/dev/ub* devices. Since I had no /dev/ub* entries, I thought it was a good time
to install udev. Upon doing so, my /dev/ fs was looking very nice and clean, and
sure enough it had a /dev/uba{,1} entry for my Neuros. 

After doing some stupid things to my Neuros (e.g. pulling the cable out while it
was syncing), and after umount segfaulted, things started getting weird. I
thought it was time to restart udev. And then, I found out udev wasn't actually
*running*. I didn't have a hotplug-enabled kernel (so why were my /dev entries
combobulated?), so neither hotplug nor udev were started. I promptly recompiled
my kernel with make-kpkg, then installed the new kernel package. I told the dpkg
install script to go ahead and run lilo, since the new kernel was overwriting
the symlinks referenced in lilo.conf. Then, lilo (lilo -t, to be precise) ran
for 25 minutes before I gave up on it. I tried lilo -v 5, which gave the
following output before freezing:


    <snip>
    Reading boot sector from /dev/hda
    geo_get: device 0300, all=1
    pf_hard_disk_scan: (3,0) /dev/hda
    pf_hard_disk_scan: (3,1) /dev/hda1
    lookup_dev:  number=0300

I thought I'd try grub. It fails in the same manner. I thought I'd make a boot
floppy with grub. Same. School is about to start, and since I sorta need a
computer I might just boot Knoppix and fix things from there, but if anyone has
ideas about this, I'd rather learn something from this besides "Don't anger
umount".

Thanks. :)

-Bryan

p.s. I now have a bunch of lilos and grubs floating around. ^C didn't work, so I
was using ^Z and 'kill %1', but even using kill -9 <PID> won't make them
disappear from the list of processes. 

-- 
Bryan Richter
UCDTT President
UC Davis Undergrad, Physics Dept.
-
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