Problems with udev-096 and a solution
 

Hello,

yesterday I upgraded to udev-96 and could no longer boot into my Slackware system. The Problem was, that udev did not create the /dev/* entries for the harddisks (and probably many other things as well), because it lacked /sbin/udevstart and /etc/udev/scripts/make_extra_nodes.sh.
As I was unable to boot my Slackware system I used a Knoppix CD to boot the computer, downloaded the package udev-71, extracted it and put those two files there manually.

After I could boot my beloved Slackware again, I uninstalled udev-96 and reinstalled udev-71.

I cannot say what the problem exactly is, but this at least gave me a working Slackware back :-)

Now I cannot wait for 11 to come out - I promised myself to do a clean reinstall when it get released :)

have you upgrade sysvinit packages also?
do you have kernel version above 2.6.15??

I had a similar problem a few months back. I had to use knoppix to revert to an older version. It seems to be a common problem; certain versions of udev simply fail to work on some systems. As much as I like it, it's such a critical part of the os that I think they need to work harder to make sure it works properly before releasing new versions. In the meantime, I've learned to always have a copy of knoppix and a known-working version of udev ready before I update.

Yes I use -current. The kernel is 2.6.16.19, but custom build. I do not think I really want to hunt down the problem, as I will do a clean reinstall once Slackware 11 is released anyway.

take a look at /etc/rc.d/ directory
there you will see rc.udev.new. Rename it to rc.udev to reflect the latest udev. Maybe you haven't move this file, so it still the previous version.

I just had to do this. The errors were for rc.udev at li 47 and 48; udevstart and makeextranodes.sh couldn't be found and it caused a failure to boot with a suggestion to run fsck. I was also getting errors like "swapon: cannot stat" for my swap partition.

Glad it turned out to be something easy I was thinking the disk was hosed.