Re: sarge installation fails to populate directories

[brownh@hartford-hwp.com (Haines Brown)]

A follow up to my last message: I've fixed the superblock on the
target disk, and the fsck runs without error, but cdebootstrap still
fails to mount root and aborts package setup, which I presume is why
/usr and /var still are left empty:

> > Haines Brown wrote:
> > > The problem is that /usr and /var directories are empty. I struggled
> > > with this with debootstrap for a while, although usually the /var
> > > partition was filled, but never /usr until advised to use
> > > cdebootstrap. That went well and partitions were filled, but for a
> > > reason irrelevant here, I started again from the beginning, and now
> > > cdebootstrap wouldn't fill /var and /usr. All the base packages were
> > > downloaded and unpacked, but for some reason one or more directories
> > > not seen. 
> > 
> > That's quite stange, I have never heard of or experienced
> > debootstrap having such a problem. I'd look to see if my kernel or
> > filesystem or disk are broken somehow, and strace debootstrap to see
> > what's happening when it tries to create files in those directories.
> 
> Joey,

...
 
> Here are exactly my steps subsequent to the boot. The target disk
> is already partitioned and the partitions were initialized, including 
> swap. I booted and:
> 
>   1. # mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/debinst
>   2. # strace -o /opt/tmp/strace cdebootstrap sarge /mnt/debinst
>      http://http.us.debian.org/debian 

...
 
> but the process termininated with:
> 
>   E: Couldn't install root!
> 
> In the strace for this:
> 
>   ...
>   poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN, revents=POLLHUP}, {fd=6, events=POLLIN, 
>      revents=POLLHUP}], 2, -1) = 2
>   waitpid(1581, [{WIFEXITED(s) && WEXITSTATUS(s) == 1}], 0) = 1581
>   close(4)                                = 0
>   munmap(0x4001a000, 4096)                = 0
>   close(6)                                = 0
>   munmap(0x4001b000, 4096)                = 0
>   write(3, "E: Couldn\'t install root!\n", 26) = 26
>   write(2, "E: Couldn\'t install root!\n", 26) = 26
>   oldumount("/mnt/debinst/proc")          = 0
>   munmap(0x40018000, 4096)                = 0
>   munmap(0x40019000, 4096)                = 0
>   exit_group(1)                           = ?
> 
> I'm not sure what "installing root" implies in this context. 
> 
> That's it. To judge by google, the Can't mount root error message from
> cdebootstrap is apparently not common. Last year it came up once with
> a particular version of gcc, but I'm running sarge, and presumably
> that problem was fixed. 
> 
> Haines Brown