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From: DrMemory on 13 Nov 2007 18:40
I recently dusted off a retired old machine, found some more memory to
put in it, and decided to get it running.
It had 2 hd's. I did a clean install of 2006, and things were working
fine. Disk layout as follows (bear with me, you'll see the relevance
soon):
hda: /var, /tmp, an old windows partition, and large spare partition.
hdc: /, /usr, /usr/local, /home
After a couple of days, hdc started acting up. Would work for a while
and then fail. So, I reformated the windows and spare partitions on
hda and, following the directions in the "Upgrading a Hard drive"
howto
(using the cp -a /usr /etc /bin .... /new/ method). Then created /new/
{proc,sys},
modified the /new/etc/fstab and /new/boot/grub/menu.lst, plus setup
grub
to live in hda's mbr. I'm sure you all know the drill.

So, all seemed well, *except* that when I booted up the 'new' system
now residing solely on hda, there was no usb support whatsoever.
dmesg|grep usb gives nothing. I did a file-by-file cmp of /etc and /
new/etc.
Other than fstab/mtab, no differences at all!

I set it up so I could boot into either the "old" hdc-rooted sys or
the new one. The hdc-rooted one loads all of the usb drivers, and
everything works fine, picks up my thumb-drive when I plug it in. The
hda-based does nothing.
I can manually modprobe the usb stuff, then do udev force-reload, and
then the "new" system works fine. But why this difference? It is
driving me crazy, and hope somebody can shed some light.

thanks, Scott.

From: David W. Hodgins on 17 Nov 2007 07:16
On Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:40:09 -0500, DrMemory <drmemory(a)3rivers.net> wrote:

> So, all seemed well, *except* that when I booted up the 'new' system
> now residing solely on hda, there was no usb support whatsoever.
> dmesg|grep usb gives nothing. I did a file-by-file cmp of /etc and /
> new/etc.
> Other than fstab/mtab, no differences at all!

Only thing I can think of, is to double check the permissions of directories
like /tmp, /dev, etc. I've seen problems with that, when using the cp -a
method of copying a root directory, even though booted from a cd.

Regards, Dave Hodgins

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From: Jim Beard on 17 Nov 2007 09:31

> On Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:40:09 -0500, DrMemory <drmemory(a)3rivers.net> wrote:
>
>> So, all seemed well, *except* that when I booted up the 'new' system
>> now residing solely on hda, there was no usb support whatsoever.
>> dmesg|grep usb gives nothing. I did a file-by-file cmp of /etc and /
>> new/etc.
>> Other than fstab/mtab, no differences at all!

David W. Hodgins wrote:
> Only thing I can think of, is to double check the permissions of directories
> like /tmp, /dev, etc. I've seen problems with that, when using the cp -a
> method of copying a root directory, even though booted from a cd.

Perhaps it needed a cp -ap or maybe a cp -apL version of the copy command?
Permissions and symbolic (or maybe even hard) links would seem a possible
problem.

Cheers!

jim b.

--
UNIX is not user-unfriendly; it merely
expects users to be computer-friendly.
From: DrMemory on 20 Nov 2007 10:23
On Nov 17, 7:31 am, Jim Beard <jim.be...(a)verizon.net> wrote:
> > On Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:40:09 -0500, DrMemory <drmem...(a)3rivers.net> wrote:
>
> >> So, all seemed well, *except* that when I booted up the 'new' system
> >> now residing solely on hda, there was no usb support whatsoever.
> >> dmesg|grep usb gives nothing. I did a file-by-file cmp of /etc and /
> >> new/etc.
> >> Other than fstab/mtab, no differences at all!
> David W. Hodgins wrote:
> > Only thing I can think of, is to double check the permissions of directories
> > like /tmp, /dev, etc. I've seen problems with that, when using the cp -a
> > method of copying a root directory, even though booted from a cd.

All of the permissions, symlinks etc. seem to be exactly identical!

>
> Perhaps it needed a cp -ap or maybe a cp -apL version of the copy command?
> Permissions and symbolic (or maybe even hard) links would seem a possible
> problem.

The manual says -a is equivalent to -dpPR

It looks like the /sys structure isn't getting set up right, causing
later bootscripts to not see that there is any usb in place. I have no
idea where the /sys gets set up, someplace deep in the kernel? This
just has me baffled.

Thanks for any further ideas if anyone has any!

Scott.
From: David W. Hodgins on 20 Nov 2007 10:42
On Tue, 20 Nov 2007 10:23:04 -0500, DrMemory <drmemory(a)3rivers.net> wrote:

> It looks like the /sys structure isn't getting set up right, causing
> later bootscripts to not see that there is any usb in place. I have no
> idea where the /sys gets set up, someplace deep in the kernel? This
> just has me baffled.

/sys is setup by the kernel. This may be the problem. When you boot
from a cd, or other linux system, mount and browse the root partition
of the new installation, /sys should be empty. If you have copied
directories into it, that may be preventing the kernel from setting
them up.

In my case, I was copying from a filesystem where /tmp was on a seperate
filesystem (mounted during the copy), to a filesystem where the /tmp
directory was in the root filesystem. The result was wrong settings of
the permissions for the /tmp directory. ls -l showed an uppercase T
instead of a lowercase t. I also found the -x option was not keeping
the copy source, restricted to one file system, as I expected, causing
a lot of problems where absolute symlinks were used. I ended up
switching to rsysnc, which is much faster anyway.

Regards, Dave Hodgins

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