Debian Squeeze Udev not working - won't boot
 

I tried to boot my laptop up this morning and got as far as GDM, but with no mouse movement, and no keyboard. Trying again in normal mode, and in recovery mode, the same thing happens each time. I see a FAILED message at boot coming from udev (something about udev already running), so I assume its' not detecting my hardware. At GDM I can't type in anything, I can't even ^Alt+F to switch to a console, can't do anything at all. I did an aptitude safe-upgrade yesterday but that's it, so I can't imagine what's gone wrong here.

The installation is on a Luks-encrypted LVM partition. I have mounted the root partition from an ubuntu live CD, but the /var/log/boot is empty, and dmesg says nothing unusual about udev. I can't find the error I see on bootup anywhere in the log files.

Pls help!
Thanks in advance

Spoovy

OK I deleted gdm then logged into single user mode as root, then switched to normal user, started dbus and networking and did a startx. Now I have my desktop back!

I don't really want to have to do this everytime though - anyone have any idea how to sort this out??

I have activated bootlogd but there is still nothing in /var/log, so I still ca'nt provide any log details i'm afraid. For some reason udev detects my hardware ok when it runs in S mode, but as soon as I go to RL2 or 5 I get the same problem.

The error message is something about udev not binding or something?

Forget it - I ran out of ideas and tried to reconfigure initramfs (after reading this bug report) -

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=593083

..and completely buggered up my installation so it wouldn't even get past grub. I had to wipe it & reinstall Lenny.

I guess this is why Squeeze is still in testing. Hope this gets fixed though, cos it's a nasty bug.