I have a problem with chroot.
 

Because of a slightly buggy/eccentric harddisk (remind me to back up!) I have to chroot into another partition where I have knoppix and run lilo from there. I've done this before, the problem is that when I chroot I get an infinite loop like this:
/dev/null : access denied
/dev/null : access denied
/dev/null : access denied
/dev/null : access denied
/dev/null : access denied
/dev/null : access denied
...etc

I am running as root of course. The access denied must have something to do with shell permissions and/or what chroot actually does beneath the hood.

But I have no idea how to avoid it. I've avoided it before, but I can't remember how!

I wonder if I should send a bug to gnu coreutils? True, it is something in my (Fedora core 1) setup, but going into a loop like this is in any case a pretty bad handling of whatever the problem is... If I had a sensible error message it would have been a lot easier.

What's the command you issue to chroot?
What's the actual problem you face when you try to run lilo from your normal shell?
That error is a bug, but if Fedora wraps chroot (bad idea, but you never know), for example, then it's not necessarily GNU's fault. Before you file a bug report, you'll want to make sure you're filing it with the right group. . .

The issue is something with the MBR on my hda. I tried to install grub from redhat after I got stuck on this problem. When I did that I got a useful error message from grub for the first time: Error 5. From the info file it says "this is bad" because some sanity checks failed.

I later managed to chroot. I remembered what I had to do: I had to mount hda2 manually with

mount -t reiserfs /dev/hda knoppix/

instead of just

mount knoppix

Then it works as it should (and I have lilo in my mbr again... but I think I'll backup that drive!!)

The weird thing is that the same problem exists when I boot with a knoppix cd! So I wonder if it is kudzu? I'll take a look in my fstab and I will try different combintations to see precisely when the bug appears.