Keith Devens .com

From what stage though?

I installed it from Stage 3 and it was too slow on my laptop, be advised.

I'm doing a stage 2 install. I've been compiling for hours

Argh! One of the mirrors I've chosen is timing out on the last package in "emerge system" and it won't give up the connection. It's been sitting there hung for a while and it won't give up and move on. What the heck do I do?

Oh man, it finally timed out after what felt like 20 minutes, but now it has four more tries to go through! Argh!

Note: Don't use HTTP mirrors!! And don't be stupid like I was and have more than one of your mirrors be set to the same host. ftp://gentoo.mirrors.pair.com/ is super fast for me (except for now), so I made that and http://gentoo.mirrors.pair.com/ my first two mirrors. But, they're both down now. Don't make my mistake

But hey, if this is the worst problem I have in the entire install I'll be extremely happy. I still won't know for many hours whether my install will even work at all.

Good luck to you. Keep posting your saga/adventure.

I remember my first Gentoo install last December. During the install I kept thinking, "I'm not exactly sure everything that I'm doing here, so I hope the docs are right." (I also remember the install taking forever--I started from stage1!)

Now, though, I look back and think, "Wow, I know so much more about the underworkings of linux from using Gentoo." Previously, I had used RedHat for about 7 years, and I won't be going back.

If you can't get the grub issue sorted out, post here and I'll try to help.

If you can't get the grub issue sorted out, post here and I'll try to help.

I could really use it. I can't get GRUB sorted out at all. I have a slightly abnormal setup and I can't get anything to work. I'll post back with a full description of everything later today. Thanks.

As promised:

Here's my setup: I have three hard drives, and two CD-ROMs (one DVD-ROM, one CD writer). Hard drives 1, 2, and 3 are 80g, 40g, and 20g respectively. HD1 is the new hard drive I just got specifically to run Gentoo on. HD3 has been my main drive until now, and that's the drive Windows is on.

The way my setup is abnormal is that my hard drives aren't running on IDE off my mobo, but are connected to an ATA-100 controller card. My CD drives are connected master and slave on my secondary IDE off my motherboard, while HD1 is the primary master on the controller card, HD2 is the primary slave, and HD3 is the secondary master.

SO, the result of all this is that Linux reads the drives as follows: hda and hdb don't exist, hdc and hdd are my CD drives, and my hard drives are hde (HD1), hdf (HD2), and hdg (HD3). hde has 3 partitions 1=boot (ext2), 2=swap, and 3=root (reiserfs), hdf has one fat32 partition, and hdg has one partition (ntfs). If you want, I'll boot my computer with Knoppix and paste my fstab, but I don't think that matters at the point that GRUB has control.

My /boot/grub/grub.conf is what they recommended (from memory):

default 0
timeout 15

title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.7 r12
root (hd0,0)
kernel /kernel-2.6.7-r12 root=/dev/hde3

title=Windows
map (hd0) (hd2)
map (hd2) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd2,0)
makeactive
chain+1

Those aren't the real titles I have (not that it matters), I don't remember the exact name of my kernel (but, I know I have it right in my GRUB config because it was able to autocomplete it for me), and yes, right now I forget the actual name of the command for "chain+1", but I have it right in the config.

The map lines for the Windows boot commands weren't there originally, but without them trying to boot Windows did nothing. With them, and this is strange, Windows starts booting (I get the black Windows boot screen with the throbber), but then a few seconds later the screen goes blank, the monitor shuts off because it's no longer getting a signal, and when I wait for long enough I get a blue Windows core-dump screen telling me that it had some problem with the display adapter and it dumps memory to disk, promising that next time I boot it'll give me some option about what to do about it (but it doesn't).

As for when I try to boot Linux, I'm getting the same error a lot of people seem to be getting: I get a Kernel panic and it tells me "unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)". I think it also tells me to check that I've specified the correct root= setting. I've tried /dev/hda3 in addition to /dev/hde3 (maybe I should try /dev/hdc?).

In any case, I'm not sure why it's not working (obviously). I can give you full error messages, details of files like fstab or grub.conf, my kernel .config file, or anything else you want if you ask. Please don't feel a big obligation to spend a lot of time helping me, though I really appreciate any help you can give. If you have no clue just let me know and I'll either go to the Gentoo IRC channel for more help or I'll install Mandrake or something Thanks a bunch.

Hmm, are you sure "hd0" is the bootable hard drive? Maybe try "hd1", or if "hde" is anything to go by, "hd4"

Jase

Yes,

I think Jase is on the right track. For the line "root (hd0,0)", the hd0 is the first disk (including your cdroms), first partition. So, this would normally point to /dev/hda1 ("a" being the first disk, "1" being the first partition). I don't remember what the rules are if there is no hda or hdb, but I'm tempted to think that you should still count the disks like so:

hda = hd0
hdb = hd1
hdc = hd2
hdd = hd3
hde = hd4
hdf = hd5
hdg = hd6

No, GRUB doesn't count CD-ROMs, and it doesn't care about the normal numbering of your drives. When I type "root ([TAB]" to autocomplete and get a list of the drives that are available, I get hd0, hd1, and hd2, as expected.

Oh, furthermore, when I autocomplete to have GRUB tell me what partitions are available on hd0-2, I get three on hd0, and just one on hd1 and hd2, all as expected.

yep, should have been "excluding your cdroms". sorry for the bad info.

Hmm. You do have ext2 in the kernel, right?

Hmm. You do have ext2 in the kernel, right?

Yes, so far as I know. I checked the box for ext2 support when I went through menuconfig, so it should be there unless for whatever reason my kernel compile didn't use the .config I set up. I also checked the box for built-in reiserfs support since that's my root filesystem.

I was looking through their current documentation on the gentoo website, and they changed the documentation since the version I printed out just a few days ago. I went through some of the things they added regarding the GRUB install, but unfortunately I still get the same error as before.

I'm writing this from links on the Gentoo LiveCD I need to get an IRC client on this thing so that I can connect to the gentoo IRC channel.

"unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)"

Well, (0, 0) looks like a major/minor pair and 0, 0 would Be Bad.

Do you need drivers for the ATA card? If so, does the kernel have them?

Indeed, that message comes from init/do_mounts.c:303 and the 0,0 is a major minor pair.

It looks like it gets the major/minor pair from sysfs:
sprintf(path, "/sys/block/%s/dev", name);

So that's failing. Do you see the IDE devices being picked up by the kernel as it boots?

If so, then you can give the root device as
root=123:456

Tertiary i/f: ide2: major=33; (hde) minor=0; (hdf) minor=64

So I believe that hde3 is 33:3

Try that

(and emailing me is best if you want a reply:
agl AT imperialNOSPAMviolet.org)

AGL

I spoke to a really helpful guy on #gentoo who helped me figure it out. I needed support for my ATA-100 controller card compiled into the kernel. With that done I booted right up.

I still can't boot Windows though, and I'm not sure why.

Actually, that reads like I took too much credit. I didn't do much figuring out... The guy I spoke to connected to my machine over SSH, checked out all my pci cards, and recompiled my kernel with the appropriate support and everything. Thanks Roger!

Adam, thanks for the suggestions. You were right about the ATA controller needing drivers installed. Luckily, the kernel had them.