Hi all,

I reinstalled a debian system (on my goof-around-partition), mostly in order to try apt-build (a very interesting thing btw ) and while I was at it I tried to chroot. Of course, it worked just fine.

I've been by now installing a few things on my new system- not much; x-windows and xfce are the major things; and a few small tools (like links2, fbtv, etc.).

To my surprise, chroot seized working again when I tried it now.

So my question: are there any softwares that could be the cause of my little problem here?

Thanks.

Hi Nightfrost. Don't know if I'm way out here as I had so many problems with Gentoo 3.0 with a stage 3 install using Genkernel. But, I had the same problem with chroot. And seem to remember that it was to do with missing the command "cd /mnt/gentoo" just before extracting the tarball way back at the beginning of the install. It may be worth going back as your not too far into the install, or remembering if you did that cd.
Another couple of errors I made were:
Making a directory /root instead of just mounting the "/" directory (that caused a few problems)
Also I did not make a /boot partition on the earlier installs and think that may have caused a few problems as well. Mekon.

Thanks alot for the reply. Somehow it feels nice to know that someone else has had a similar problem (it was starting to feel a bit weird for a while there ).

However, I'm not sure if I have the same problem you had. The thing is, I gave up on the gentoo-installation (at least for the moment), and installed a new debian version. And it is from within this new installation that I recently tried to chroot into my main OS, also debian on another patition. Now, the problem is that chroot worked when my base was installed and now it doesn't. The system I'm attempting to chroot to has not been touched at all. The "only" difference between the early attempt of chroot (which worked) and the later attempts (which didn't work), is my installation of a few additional packages.

But thanks again for your tips on gentoo; I'll keep those in mind next time I attempt a gentoo installation.

Hmm..
one way to see what you have updated resently is
What is the output?
Also what are their versions?
Do you have something else than debian proper is your /etc/apt/sources.list and/or have you installed any packages outside the debian system?

OK, well, I've been running gentoo for months (linux for years), and just hit this problem on an AMD64 machine tryig to build a 32 bit chroot to compile/emerge 32 bit stuff (mplayer!)

I'm stumped. I checked tons of permissions (chroot directory, /bin directory, the /bin/bash itself inside the chroot, the libraries in /lib), and have tried various variations on those commands.

I remember messing with chroots when I first installed gentoo and I didn't have any problem - I'm wondering if this an artifact of a more recent stage tarball. I'm using Stage 3 for the chroot, though I used stage 1 for the main install.

Anyone have any other ideas?

The thing is; I removed the entire system and reinstalled debian again. Right now I only have the base system installed and chrooting works, so I'll go ahead - when I find the time - to install packages again and test chrooting frequently to see when it fails. Thanks a lot for the commands, I'm sure they'll prove to be useful. I had some extra stuff in my sources.list, such as bootsplash, mplayer, radeon-drivers, etc., but I don't think I actually had anything installed which was not debian proper. I'll keep that in mind though, for this new attempt.


Could be, I guess; but - as you probably have noticed following this thread - my chroot-problem doesn't really have anything to do with gentoo - I suffer the same problem in debian. Could it be a kernel-thing? (In case I haven't mentioned it earlier, I'm using a 2.6.9-based kernel)

I figured out my problem...I was in the process of posting something to the Gentoo forums when it hit me that I had not mounted my mount point (/mnt/32) with the right options! I had put in noauto, for example, but I had neglected to put in "defaults", and more specifically, "exec", which will allow me to execute files from that mount point. It fixed it for me, hope this helps for you.

Haleluja!

You're so right! That was my problem as well. Can't believe that passed me by. Everything's working now.