Naming: Where Dev Became Unmounted

Can’t open ‘/dev/console’: No such file or directory

I find myself running against computer problems on a daily basis and on occasion problems I’ve run up against before. I

created an rsync of a Linux machine and got this message booting up. The symptom was it stopped displaying text after it tried to boot the Linux kernel. It eventually booted and I was able to log in. I didn’t understand why it was complaining about /dev/console missing because it was there.

Some problems are just very low level and you have to take that aproch at them. On most Linux systems /dev is mounted by some means. On modern systems it is by udev, on embedded systems it

might be mdev and on older systems it might be devfs. Some systems don’t mount dev and rely on the user to manage devices manually. If you need to copy

root while you have other file systems mounted over it, the bind option of mount will be useful for you. Here is an example.

mount -obind / /mnt/root

Now the content of your root device is located in /mnt/root without the other file systems that are overlayed on top of it. I hope this helps someone who is wondering the Internet. Similar errors are that the system can’t find random, urandom or null.