Re: [gentoo-desktop] System problems

[Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org>]

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On 11:36 Sun 20 Mar     , Lindsay Haisley wrote:
> On Sun, 2011-03-20 at 08:24 +0000, Jean-Marc Beaune wrote:
> > This is due to ATA/ATAPI (DEPRECATED) being disabled in newer kernels,
> > replaced by Serial ATA and Parallel ATA drivers. 
> > 
> > Make sure you enabled this support properly. 
> > 
> > In my case that happened to me as well, on a remote computer, which
> > was my mother's box... 
> > 
> > Anyway, in fstab /dev/sdXX shoud work, at least I made this change on
> > a couple of machines and that went fine. 
> 
> Jean-Marc, thanks.  This gives me a bit of insight.
> 
> I've been compiling kernels for this box for some time, carrying over
> the .config file between kernel versions and updating them.  Last night
> I built IDE functionality as a module (it was previously compiled into
> the kernel, as per my carried-over .config files) thinking that I would
> simply not load it at run-time.  As I noted in my post, while the the
> kernel recognized "root=/dev/sda4" as a kernel param, the boot process
> crashed with a note that "/dev/sda4" wasn't recognized.  It's entirely
> possible that this module got auto-loaded, or that there's some other
> anomaly in my kernel config that's throwing things off.

I also suspect What Jean-Marc said is the problem. I'd recommend 
completely disabling everything in the old ATA section to ensure it 
doesn't attempt to control any devices, while building the PATA driver 
into the kernel and using root=/dev/sdXN in the grub parameters.

The module approach should also work, but I always get a little 
suspicious that it might build something else into the kernel 
unnecessarily that causes problems.

> My next step is to completely rebuild the kernel, using the config built
> into the distributed kernel source, making only the necessary mods for
> the box's hardware needs.  I'll find a time window during the next few
> days to work on this.

It might be a worthwhile step to boot from a LiveCD and run `lspci -k` 
to identify the kernel modules. If the pciutils version on the CD is too 
old, `pcimodules` might work instead.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Desktop project lead
Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.com

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