# [SOLVED] Unable to boot - udev stuck on "Waiting for..."

## Wintershade

Hey guys,

I've just made a fresh Gentoo installation on my laptop, and now I'm having trouble booting. For the record, until a few days ago I've had a fully working Gentoo install, but after 5-6 months of experimenting with various /etc settings, portage overlays, etc. I figured the easiest way to clean everything up was to make a clean reinstall.

So anyway,  I follow the Gentoo Handbook and I install the stage3, compile the ~amd64 kernel (via genkernel), install grub, generate an EFI image, reboot... and the system hangs. At least from what I can tell. It gets stuck on the udev message "Waiting for uevents to be processed" and never goes past this point (I've actually left it like that for a few hours).

Can anyone shed some light on this? I know this question was already posted, but the "newest" such thread I could find was from 3 years ago  :Sad: 

Thanks in advance!

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## DawgG

i've had this problem once (a long time ago) and booting would continue if i just hit <ENTER> (or maybe <CTRL-C>?) at "waiting for uevents ...". i think it went away after reinstalling openrc (or maybe changing a setting in rc.conf).

sorry i can't remember more since it happened so long ago.

GOOD LUCK!

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## charles17

 *Wintershade wrote:*   

> I've just made a fresh Gentoo installation on my laptop, and now I'm having trouble booting. 

 

Are you sure you used a recent stage 3 for installation as from https://get.gentoo.org/?

 *Wintershade wrote:*   

> Can anyone shed some light on this? I know this question was already posted, but the "newest" such thread I could find was from 3 years ago 

 

Setting rc_parallel="YES" in /etc/rc.conf should help, hopefully.

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## krinn

it must hangs at waiting for uevent while dev manager is stuck trying to load a missing firmware.

you should let it go for minutes until it pass the problem, check dmesg to see who is crying about firmware (mostly network card), install it and you'll should be good to go.

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## Wintershade

Hey guys, me again. Thanks for your feedback - I have tried most things:

I have made another fresh, clean install of Gentoo, without any modifications to any configuration file. The stage3 package was downloaded from https://get.gentoo.org

I have tried reinstalling OpenRC, as well as eudev.

I have bumped OpenRC to the latest ~amd64 version

I have downgraded eudev to version 3.1.2 rather than 3.1.5.

I have set rc_parallel="YES" in rc.conf.

None of these did any difference - booting still hangs at "Waiting for uevents to be processed."

Here is what OpenRC does before that:

```

/proc is already mounted

mounting /run...

/run/openrc: creating directory

/run/lock: creating directory

/run/lock: correcting owner

Caching service dependencies ...

Remounting devtmpfs on /dev ...

Mounting /dev/mqueue ...

Mounting /dev/shm ...

Creating lit of required static device nodes for the current kernel ...

Mounting security filesystem ...

Mounting debug filesystem ...

Mounting fuse control filesystem ...

Mounting SELinux filesystem ...

Mounting efivarfs filesystem ...

Mounting cgroup filesystem ...

Setting up tmpfiles.d for /dev ...

Starting udev ...

Generating a rule to create a /dev/root symlink ...

Populating /dev with existing devices through uevents ...

Waiting for uevents to be processed ...

```

...and that's it. It hangs. Pressing Enter or Ctrl+C or anything else makes no difference.

 *krinn wrote:*   

> it must hangs at waiting for uevent while dev manager is stuck trying to load a missing firmware.
> 
> you should let it go for minutes until it pass the problem, check dmesg to see who is crying about firmware (mostly network card), install it and you'll should be good to go.

 

Waiting does no good. It does not move. How can I check dmesg if the system is frozen?

Thanks again!

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## The Doctor

There is a wonderful tool for situations like this known as The System Rescue CD.

Use it to examine /var/log/messages and /var/log/dmesg. Chroot from the environment to get portage working to install linux-firmware.

But first unplug anything like extra usb sticks, external hard drives, etc. You may find that the problem is actually one of them and low hanging fruit and all that.

Also, please to waste your time reinstalling again. All that does is give you the opportunity to make the same mistake twice. You don't reinstall Gentoo. You fix your mistakes. Most of the time anyway.

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## Wintershade

There were no /var/log/messages or /var/log/dmesg files.

However, I eventually solved the problem. I was pointed out by a friend that, if I have Optimus graphics (which I do), I need to configure the kernel for it before booting Gentoo for the first time - i.e. I had to reconfigure the kernel and compile the Intel graphics module as built-in.

It all works now. Thanks everyone for your help!

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