[tlug] udevd on Gentoo hanging on boot

[Al Hoang <hoanga@example.com>]

Hi all,

   I'm really lost on this one...  Has anyone seen a case when booting 
up a Gentoo box udevd just hangs and refuses to do anything?   I had 
done an emerge system on around June 6th or 8th so it updated the 
relevant system libraries to that point.
   What I can do is break out of starting udevd (so I assume udevd 
never starts) which gets me to the point where it the system startup 
messages show it trying to clear /tmp then it hangs there.  If I break 
out of that I can get into system maintenance mode.   The version of 
udev I'm using is 087 and I'm running kernel revision 
linux-2.6.15-gentoo-r1.
So far I've tried:
1. A forced filesystem check (zero errors)
2. Re-emerging udev (for some reason emerge just hangs so this goes nowhere)
3. Sit and wait half an hour for udevd to finally clear up (no go)
4. Break out of starting udevd and waiting half an  hour for the 
cleaning /tmp to finish up (I get dumped into a system recovery console 
but I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing at this point)
5. Reseating all the hard drive cables connections in the box (long shot 
and no go)
   What I probably should try but haven't yet:
1. Start udevd manually by hand and see if that runs properly
2. Manually untarring a udev binary package that is made by portage.

   Any hints on where I should be looking for the problem?
   My current workaround at the moment was to install Dapper on a 
separate partition and see if it that helped  (it did).  As far as I can 
see, Dapper has no issues with udevd starting up so I get the feeling I 
must have borked something on my Gentoo box. 

Alain