Incomplete Install After Following Beginner's Guide [solved]

Question

If you look at my join date, I've been here longer than most (absolutely not a claim to being a guru or anything, in fact in many ways, I'm still a n00b) , but this latest install was... interesting, to say the least.  (wel, it's still ongoing)
cd image: 2014 10.1
I used the beginner's guide because there have been significant changes to the install process in recent years.  Everything was going well until I rebooted, and there were no entries in grub.  After thinking about it a bit, I wondered if there were no entries because mkgrub-config (I automatically generate grub.config) couldn't find a kernel.  So I booted back into the install media, chrooted into my new install, and lo and behold, there was not kernel installed (yes I did use pacstrap to install both base and base-devel and used the "all" option)
This might not be a problem with pacstrap, or with the beginner's guide, but with the way that these meta packages are arranged, I don't know. 
So I installed a kernel, generated grub again, and rebooted, to get the old "you're on your own, pal" message, because init wasn't found. So, I rebooted back to the livecd , installed sysv-compat, and full of optimism "this is finally over with!" booted back into my new install.  Still no good!  For some as yet unknown reason, I can't use pacman to download packages.  (Failed retrieving error)  I know that I setup my network during during the install process, so my first instinct is to ping my router.  No good!  Ping isn't installed either!
I know that there are other steps I can take to find out what my network problem is,  (if that's what it is), but I think that something has gone wrong if ping isn't installed during the install process, let alone the kernel.  And isn't sysv-init unnecessary these days?  I can probably solve these, and as yet unknown problems that will almost certainly arrive when I fix those, but I am running out of time, so I'm writing this post instead.  Did I miss something?  Is it just me?  Or is the install process broken?
Last edited by Convergence (2014-10-16 23:33:06)

Answer 1

Trilby wrote:Everything you describe sounds like symptoms of partitions not being properly mounted.  How is your drive partitioned?  What is in your fstab?
Do you mean how were the drives mounted during install, or during boot?  Both? 
Thanks for responding!
My drive setup is kind of confusing, but /dev/sda1 is / and /dev/sdc1 is /home.  I don't use a separate /boot partition.  During install, I verified that I was mounting the correct partions/drives before using 'mount /dev/sda1 /mnt /bin/bash' and used a similar command to mount /home inside of the already mounted /.  During the install process, I used 'genfstab -L >> /etc/fstab', (this command was new to me) or something like it.  I verified that the generated fstab looked sane to me (that the boot order was correct, it used the proper labels).
Now, in my new install, "df" shows that /dev/sda1 is root (as it should be), and that sdc1 is /home (also as it should be). 
mtab says (among other things) "/dev/sda1 / ext4 rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode620,ptmxmode=000 0 0"  (there may be a typo because I'm typing this on my wife's laptop)  the options listed for sdc1 are /hom ext4 rw,relatime,data-=ordered 0 0   
My fstab entries look something like this:  LABEL=rooty / ext4 rw,relatime,data=ordered 0 1 
My directory tree seems to be in order, /bin has binaries in it, /home has all my old files in it.
Does that answer your question?