library issue when running mips binary in a chrooted environment

Question

Background

In my endeavor to RE my router, I'm trying to emulate a router's firmware inside a QEMU MIPS system. I have debian-mips installed to a virtual disk that runs just fine. Its a MIPS32 Big Endian system. I don't have any issue with the debian system. I have extracted the root file-system and uploaded it to the debian-mips system.

Issue

My issue is when I attempt to run any of the binaries from the router firmware:

root@debian-mips:~/firm# chroot . ./bin/busybox.old 
./bin/busybox.old: can't load library 'libcms_boardctl.so'

However, I know it's there:

root@debian-mips:~/firm# ls -l ./lib/public/
total 1512
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root    7280 Jun 28 18:27 libcms_boardctl.so
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root   11320 Jun 28 18:27 libcms_msg.so
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root  148944 Jun 28 18:27 libcms_util.so
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 1083432 Jun 28 18:27 libcrypto.so.0.9.8
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root  275712 Jun 28 18:27 libssl.so.0.9.8

Maybe my google-fu is lacking, but there is not much information on the internet about chrooting MIPS environments. Thank you for your time.

Edit add'l file info:

root@debian-mips:~/firm# file public/libcms_boardctl.so 
public/libcms_boardctl.so: ELF 32-bit MSB shared object, MIPS, MIPS32 version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, corrupted section header size

Answer 1

Well I'm not sure why this is the answer but inside /lib are two directories: ./lib/public and ./lib/private

Simply running the command cp -r ./lib/public/* ./lib/private/* ./lib will allow your binaries to function properly.

Hopefully this question will help anyone who comes across my issue in the future as I could not find another instance of this event occurring. If someone has more information why this happens please leave me a comment :)