Bug#499575: Do you have udev installed?

["J.L.H.W. Linkels" <jlinkels@rnw.an>]

On Sunday 21 September 2008, Graham wrote:
> Hi again,
>
> If I'm not mistaken, the "/dev/disk/by-uuid" stuff is generated by
> udev, so check whether you have that installed.
>
> I believe that udev is optional, but on any normal system, it's
> probably desirable.
>
> -- graham

Yes, I do.

After long research and hard thinking, I also came to the conclusion that the 
absence of /dev/disk/by-uuid must be the culprit. Not the LABEL or UUID or 
something.

ls -l /dev shows 
console null tty0 tty1 ... tty8
and that is it.

If I recall, I did see "udev" or "udevd" flashing on the boot screen. I took 
some pictures of the screen after it dropped into BusyBox, but that line is 
not visible. I checked dmesg, but that didn't give any useful information.

I added these boot parameters:
all_generic_ide    floppy_off      irqpoll
but to no avail.

I added these modules to the /etc/initramfs-tools/modules:
scsi_mod
sd_mod
sata_via

and updated initramfs. They are loaded all right, but no succes in 
creating  /dev/disk/by-uuid

I unpacked the initrd.img file and checked the existence of udev in the initrd 
file, and this is what find gives me:
./etc/udev
./etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules
./etc/udev/udev.conf
./lib/udev
./scripts/init-bottom/udev
./scripts/init-premount/udev
./scripts/local-top/udev_helper
./udevd
./udevadm
./udevsettle

Is there any way that I can trace or check what happened during executing the 
initrd file? Is there some debug parameter I can activate? Is there 
a /var/log/messages or so when I am in BusyBox? It might make life much 
easier if I can view what went on!

Thanks for your reply
jlinkels