Re: What means that: FATAL: udev is already active on /dev/.

[Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ucsc.edu>]

Cameron Hutchison wrote:

|> What I'd do is boot the system with 'init=/bin/sh' on the boot command
|> line. This will get you into your system without any /etc/init.d
|> scripts
|> running. Then remount root as read/write:
|>
|> # mount -o remount,rw /
|>
|> Then delete /dev/.udev.tdb
|>
|> # rm -f /dev/.udev.tdb
|>
|> Then remount read-only and retstart your machine:

Thank you very much indeed. This fixed the problem. I had been
assuming that .udev.tdb was being recreated at every boot, because its
datestamp always corresponded to the last reboot. But that was an
unsafe assumption, of course, since it might mean only that the file
was being touched.

I had been assuming that udev was running (before this fix) because of
entries like this in /var/log/messages:

Oct 13 07:52:52 lapdog kernel: Attached scsi removable disk sdb at
scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
Oct 13 07:52:52 lapdog scsi.agent[4423]: disk at
/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.4/usb2/2-1/2-1:1.0/host1/1:0:0:0
Oct 13 07:52:53 lapdog udev: creating device node '/dev/sdb1'
Oct 13 07:52:53 lapdog udev: creating device node '/dev/sdb'
Oct 13 07:53:05 lapdog udev: creating device node '/dev/vcs7'
Oct 13 07:53:05 lapdog udev: creating device node '/dev/vcsa7'
Oct 13 07:55:24 lapdog udev: removing device node '/dev/sda1'
Oct 13 07:55:24 lapdog udev: removing device node '/dev/sda'
Oct 13 07:55:24 lapdog kernel: usb 1-1: USB disconnect, address 2
Oct 13 07:55:48 lapdog udev: removing device node '/dev/sdb1'
Oct 13 07:55:48 lapdog udev: removing device node '/dev/sdb'

but I suppose that only means that udev was being called by hotplug,
rather than from the init-script???

There is still an awful lot that I don't understand here (especially
about the relation between the /dev/ and the /.dev/ directories), but
as usual I've learned a lot from this list, and the box is in better
shape than it was.

Thank you,

Jim