New install boot problem

[Dave Brown]

On Thu, Jan 07, 2010 at 10:33:12PM -0700, Richard B. Pyne wrote:
>  I am having trouble installing Lunar on a brand new machine. The install 
>  from the 1.6.4 ISO seems to go fine, but on reboot it will not even try to 
>  boot from the hard drive. When I do a maintenance boot from the CD, I can 
>  mount all of the partitions and everything looks good. I have checked and 
>  the /boot partition is marked bootable. If I boot from the CD with the root= 
>  parameter, the boot dies with a "unable to open console" message.
> 
>  Any help will ge greatly appreciated.

I bet your system has an unpopulated /dev.  It tries to open the console
before running udev, which causes problems.  (I've had this happen to me
before.)

(Workaround: boot up a CD in rescue mode, running udev, then do this:

    mount /dev/sda2 /mnt    # change to whatever your real root filesystem is
    cd /dev
    tar cvf - . | ( cd /mnt/dev; tar xvf - )
    mount /mnt

--Dave