fsck freakout

[Christoph]

[background]
I'm playing around with the Gentoo kernel, trying to get my Zaurus to talk to my computer without using my CF ethernet card. (I want to put stuff on a CF memory card, and can't with the ethernet card in the way. I could do it indirectly, but I'll learn more this way.)
Anyway, I'm using the Gentoo r2 kernel with my Debian installation because I the defauly 2.4.20 kernel doesn't have the options I need, and I haven't had the time to customize my Gentoo installation enough yet.
[/background]

The problem is that when I try to boot with the Gentoo kernel, I get an error from fsck that /dev/hdb4 (my root) doesn't contain a valid superblock. The partition seems to mount fine readonly, and when I boot from the 2.4.20 kernel, everything's OK. I've compared the kernel configs, and they both support ext2 and ext3 support.

 

[moorcito]

The only time I've seen that error was when I didn't have the filesystem support in the kernel, but if the configs are the same then something weird is going on. Which filesystem are you using for /dev/hdb4? What version is the gentoo kernel?

 

[Christoph]

I'm using ext3 for /dev/hdb4, and the error is that there isn't fsck can't find a valid ext2 partition on that device. I'll try another recompile to see if that clears anything up.

Edit: BTW, I compiled the kernel in a chroot'd environment (Debian chroot'd to my Gentoo root partition). IDK why that would cause any problems, but it might be relevant.

 

[Christoph]

I'm so smart. I forgot to edit /etc/fstab. Gentoo wasn't smart enough to find /dev/BOOT, /dev/ROOT and /dev/SWAP.

 

[moorcito]

That'll do it to ya every time.

 

[Titan386]

Christoph, you're not alone. Once I etc-update'd in Gentoo, and being in a lazy mood, I just had it automatically update all the files, thinking they were things of little consequence. However, I discovered upon my next reboot that the fstab, my make.conf, and assorted other things had been overwritten.

I'm always been very careful with etc-update since

 

[Christoph]

chmod 444 $(cat important_config_files)

Now that I think of it, what you did is probably what happened to me and why I can remember successfully booting before my update.