Linux newbie help!

[swestrup]

Here's the problem: I need to re-lilo my system, which currently doesn't boot. I've booted up a gentoo livecd because it a) supports my sata_via device and b) has raidtools.

I've started all of my raids and mounted all of the raids for my system in /mnt/system.

What I would like to do next is a chroot /mnt/system /sbin/lilo -q
It won't work though, because I don't have a mounted dev in /mnt/system.
I can't mount a devfs (which is what my distro uses) because there isn't one on the Gentoo livecd.
I can't for the life of me figure out how to tell udev (which is what Gentoo uses) that I would like another instance of /dev mounted at /mnt/system/dev.

I can't chroot into /mnt/system and then do a startudev because at that point I can only see my old system, and it doesn HAVE udev...

Any suggestions at this point would be most welcome!

---

EDIT: Never mind, I had forgotten about the --bind option to mount. A quick mount --bind /dev /mnt/system/dev and it all worked... (Well, not ALL worked, I have the exact same LILO error on boot now than I had before.)

Comments

[kallisti.livejournal.com]

Might I suggest Slax? It's a live CD based upon slackware, it supports fairly current kernels (and thus SATA), and has lvm and mdadm.

http://slax.linux-live.org/

ttyl

[sps.livejournal.com]

You see that there's a line in /etc/fstab that says how to mount /dev? You just do that. It's something like mount -t devfs none /mnt/system/dev .

Re: edit: uh-oh.

[swestrup]

Yeah, except that there was no such line in the fstab. Gentoo uses udev which is some bizarre user-level tool for building a dev tree on the fly as needed. Its not even mentioned in the fstab.

[sps.livejournal.com]

I meant the real fstab. Or indeed any of the millions of copies of it that I bet Google has indexed....

But then, I still had not got my head around this Gentoo/Mandrake cross-whatsitting you were trying to do.

[swestrup]

Yeah, but you know what? There's no mention of the devfs in the real fstab that we're using when we boot now. I have no idea how we have a working /dev at all...