populating /dev
 

I have a certain live CD distro - which will remain nameless - which has a dodgy HD install script, so I want to manually install to HD.
MOst of tghe directories are farily much down to copying over, but I'm stuck on how to populate the /dev directory properly. Anybody got any pointers?

Assuming you are not going to use udev or devfs then really all you need is to run the MAKEDEV script. Typically it is located in /dev but if not you can get it here:
http://www.oldlinux.org/Linux.old/bin-src/

MAKEDEV is just a bash script which creates all the devices by repeatedly running the mknod command with the correct majo/minor inode numbers described by ./Documentation/devices.txt in your kernel source.

Many thanks bulliver. I'd actually forgotten about MAKEDEV (no, seriously). Good to know it works that way.

What's the deal with devfs? It's a file system type, is it? Is it for when you set up your /dev on a separate partition? (didn't think that was so common).

I always assumed you could only have one FS type per partition.

PS. Visited your site ... good stuff. I'm not a Gentoo-ite quite yet, I hasten to add .. but, I'm getting there.

drat
 

drat, it didn't work. somethign sily going on. I copied over a MAKEDEV to the new and empty /dev and ran it with -/MAKEDEV.
Nothing happened, no errors, nor any result either. Hang on ... maybe it needs chrooting .. hang on.