I created LFS on one system and then transported the entire filesystem over to another system. On the target system, I booted from a LiveCD and used it to install grub and edit fstab, the grub.cfg file, and so on.

Upon booting, the kernel loads fine, but init never responds. The last messages on the console are from the kernel, representing devices attached and detected by the kernel. Typing on the kernel does not produce anything, however the system is not frozen or panicked - I can shift-pageup to view the message history. The system basically hangs here and nothing happens.

When I booted with init=/bin/bash as a parameter bash ran fine and I was able to remount the root filesystem rw and so on, and poke around. However, I can't seem to actually get init to do anything.

Are there any options I can setup so that init will verbosely print out what it's trying to do? I can't really debug this further until I can see why init won't proceed...

Thanks

F

Sounds like init can't find the initab file, is it there in /etc? can you post it?

Yes, inittab is there. I can view it just fine when forcing it to run a bash with init=/bin/bash

It's the stock inittab, as follows:

My kernel boot parameters are simply:

/dev/sda5 is the root filesystem, while /boot is on /dev/sda1. Again, the kernel does boot successfully (as I'm able to force a shell with init=/bin/bash). The problem seems to be init.

Another point worth making is that if I run /bin/bash via init= then try to do "exec /sbin/init", the system accesses the hard drive for a while without any console output from either the kernel or init, then powers off.

f

This line is wrong:
si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/init.d/rc sysinit

Mine hangs the same as yours if I use this line

Try using:
si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/init.d/rc S

See this:
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/...r07/usage.html

Did some further investigating and I think I figured it out.

First I fixed the init line as you suggested, but no dice...

But, somehow, my kernel didn't get compiled with devtmpfs. Therefore my /dev directory is completely empty - I'm guessing init doesn't like this. ;-)

Recompiling my kernel now, will post again (And mark as solved) if this fixes it.

Thanks!

F

/dev needs null zero and console

As linosaurusroot said. And an LFS system never has an empty /dev folder, even when it's not running. Section 6.2.1 (Creating Initial Device Nodes) of the 7.3 book has us create /dev/null and /dev/console on the hard drive.

Maybe their absence has something to do with your method of cloning the system to the new partition.

P.S.: CONFIG_DEVTMPFS=y is also required for LFS nowadays, as you said. So I wonder if the original system was ever booted before it was cloned. I sort of assumed that it was a working system, but you never really said that either. And it never would have booted without devtmpfs filesystem support built in.

Recompiled kernel, populated /dev, used a rescue disc to install the kernel and rebooted...and everything works great now.

Thanks!