Hello,

I need some help.

This is a huge "oops". I am almost finished building LFS-6.4 (at stage 8.4. Making the LFS System Bootable) and I suddenly realize that the partition where (I thought) I was installing does not exist.

So, two questions...

1) What is going on?
On the host (Debian) system, I have been building LFS at /mnt/lfs. When I check /etc/mtab, it shows the target partition mounted at this mount point ("/dev/hda2 /mnt/lfs ext3 rw 0 0"). But when I try to configure 'grub' or run 'gparted', the target partition is unallocated and does not exist. So, what is going on? Where, after all, have I been building all this?

2) What do I do?
Is there any way to salvage the work that I have done so far?

Thanks,
Geo

Okay, after the bit of panic... everything is fine.

- I copied everything in '/mnt/lfs' just to be safe.
- Although afraid of losing everything, I tried to unmount '/mnt/lfs'
- I couldn't, because "device is busy".
- I rebooted (although, if I had read ahead in the book, section 9.3. describes the proper way to unmount the LFS partition (more than one mount point))
- Now the missing partition showed up and everything was there.

- An internet search lead me to believe that 'grub' was not finding the partition (actually the whole hard drive), because '/dev' was not populated.
- Following a hint, I went back to the beginning of chapter 6.
- As root on host system, I bind-mounted '/dev' to '$LFS/dev' and mounted the virtual kernel file systems.
- Reentering the 'chroot' environment, I found '/dev' fully populated.

- I retried the 'grub' shell 'root' command and it worked.
- 'Grub' successfully found the partition.

~~~~~

So, this whole thing was not really a big problem after all.

Continuing on, I was able to boot into my shiny new custom system.

Actually, I still have some problems to work out, but as for the missing target partition... I will mark this thread "solved".

Cheers!