Repairing a failed grub_pc installation

[Toomas Tamm]

On Tue, 2011-01-18 at 19:52 +0100, Thomas Lange wrote:
> >>>>> On Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:22:41 +0200, Toomas Tamm <tt-fai at kky.ttu.ee> said:
> 
>     > First, the sysinfo system had not mounted /usr, /var, etc under /target.
>     > Wasn't it the case some years ago that a system booted into FAI sysinfo
>     > automagically found the root partitition and used the /etc/fstab there
>     > to mount the remaining partitions under /target ? Has this functionality
>     > been lost somehow?
> This should still work. But I'm not sure if it also works when usiong
> lvm and raid.

The lvm and raid in one of the commands I provided were copy-and-paste
from scripts/GRUB_PC/10-setup . This particular machine does not use
either. The disk layout, is, however quite complicated, with several
NTFS partitions, a VFAT partition, and the Linux partitions numbered
sda7-sda12.

>     > Once I manually had mounted /usr, I was met by an
>     > incomplete /target/dev. While the "global" /dev contains 176 entries,
>     > including /dev/sda, /dev/sda1, etc, the one at /target/dev has only 94
>     > entries, and is, in particular, missing the disk entries /dev/sda,
>     > /dev/sda1, etc. After some trial and error, I succeeded in creating
>     > these manually. Why were they missing?
> Very strange. Are you booting an older kernel when using sysinfo?

Exactly the same as during install, 2.6.26-2-486 . I just checked, the
pxelinux.cfg files are identical except for the FAI_ACTION.

Is it possible that the missing /usr/({s}bin|lib) is causing problems
for udev, and that leads to partially-populated /dev?

PS The original grub_pc problem is resolved by now, so any follow-ups to
this thread are mostly academic :-)

Toomas