I just thought some more about your problem and realized that my previous post probably wasn''t very helpful. Most likely you have the /dev/initctl FIFO, but since you where chrooted, init (that you executed as "init 1") opened a different /dev/initctl than the one init (that runs as process 1) listens to, so they couldn''t communicate and you got the timeout error.

This could be solved by binding /dev/initctl to $LFS/dev/initctl before chrooting, but I don''t think it would help you, since when you execute "init 1" you would be taken out of the chrooted environment (at least I think you would, I''ve never tried it myself).

Anyway, everything I''ve said so far is pretty off-topic, since you seem to be able to boot your old system and presumably you should be able to fix whatever is wrong from there. Double check that your /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and /etc/inittab files are correct. Perhaps read the man pages for ''getty'' (or ''agetty'') and ''login''. And check that /bin/login (or is it /sbin/login) actually exist. (I''m mostly just guessing at stuff here, since I''ve never had a similar problem myself).

thank

i found the problem, quite simple, the login binary wasn''t in /bin but in /usr/bin

i guess at some stage of the LFS installation i should have made a symbolic link or move it to /bin, but i missed it

anyway, thanks again for helping me target the problem