I maintain a Gentoo system in a virtualbox guest. A couple of days ago I did something stupid that screwed up my Gentoo guest. I have tried tonight to get it back, but I keep running into this problem. It's very important to me not to lose the Gentoo way of thinking, hence Virtualbox.

I have attempted going through the handbook careful to execute each step as ordered. I'm at the end of chapter 1. I have rebooted the guest into a Gentoo system free of the Gentoo CD image I was using before to get me to this point. Gentoo boots up. I see a lot of red, but it goes by faster than I can read. Now, I'm at the login prompt. I login as root, since that's the only account on the system at this point. I go to /var/log hoping for a messages file that will tell me what all the red was about. No /var/log/messages. So I immediately begin to wonder what syslog is doing (since it's not doing its job), so I restart the sysklogd service. It reports all these files it's trying to write to, and to the right of each one, it says "Read-only filesystem". Why is this happening? I want my system back! Please help! And thank you in advance for your patience with me, as well as any advice you can offer to help me work toward a resolution of this issue.

Four main causes I know of for / getting mounted RO ("Read-only filesystem") at startup:

1-missing driver for the / filesystem, whether compiled into kernel or loadable module, making it inaccessible by the time it is required

2-uncorrectable inconsistent state (needs fsck that cannot be performed automatically)

3-mount options attempted are inconsistent with those allowed

4-/ filesystem inconsistently identified among initrd, bootloader cmdline, and/or fstab; maybe root= specification in boot stanza and/or fstab contains a typing error, or UUID on / filesystem has been changed without a necessary matching bootloader configuration file update and/or initrd rebuild; or the device name assigned by the kernel on the current boot doesn't match the expected device name (root=/dev/sdb2 but kernel has assigned that device /dev/sda2 after USB stick /dev/sda for installation is no longer present)

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Hmmm. This is interesting. I just started up my vb guest and loaded using the iso file I downloaded. I mounted the gentoo drive and the three other systems I'm required to mount to ensure a sane environment, and then I tried to mount /boot. Gentoo tells me

I was going into the kernel config to make sure that the ext4 type was compiled in. It should be. When I edited /etc/fstab, I simply uncommented the filesystems that I wanted. I didn't bother to check the UUIDs. I'll do that and try booting it again.

I was able to successfully see what the problem was by holding down SHIFT and hitting PageUp until I got to the red parts. It said that my root partiton's UUID was not found. I corrected this issue and it booted fine without the iso image. Thank you for your help.