Purpose: Last week I wrote a post about how to resolve common udev startup error messages. It looks like there is another warning/error message that keeps popping up frequently during startup which does not get resolved by using any of the previous mentioned techniques in the last post. Here is the message:

.udev/ already exists on the static /dev!

What this message means is that there is a directory called .udev that exists under /dev – pretty self explanatory I guess. The trick is to delete the directory .udev when udev is not active otherwise the static /dev directory is always hidden. You need to remember the contents of /dev/ directory are populated on-the-fly because of udev installed. There are two methods to resolve this warning message.

Method 1: init=/bin/bash

From your bootloader menu (typically GRUB), press “e” key and add the following file to pass as a kernel parameter:

init=/bin/bash

Press “Enter” key and then the “b” key.

This will boot your system to a console and will mount your root filesystem (“/”) as read-only. Now make your root filesystem as write-able by giving the following command:

mount -o rw,remount /

Finally we can remove the offending directory to get rid of the udev warning message:

rm -rf /dev/.udev/

Now reboot your system as you would normally do and that udev warning should disappear.

Method 2: Use a LiveCD

Use any LiveCD like KNOPPIX, and mount your Linux hard drive partition on which you get the udev warning message:

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/

Note: You need to substitute “sda1″ with your appropriate drive and partition number.

Now you can delete the .udev directory:

rm -rf /mnt/dev/.udev/

Remove the LiveCD and boot from your hard drive and the warning message should go away.

That’s it!

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