"AT keyboard not present?" + hang on post-install

[Thomas H. Oliver]

Upon completion of the install (Stage 3 direct) I rebooted, following which I received a number of screen messages. Eventually I got the message "Keyboard: Timeout - AT keyboard not present?" and the boot hung (no more screen messages for at least 10 minutes). Any ideas?

[butters]

You shouldn't worry too much about the AT keyboard not present message. I get that message twice in succession when I boot with my USB keyboard. What you have to worry about is that the next thing that should happen after that message is the kernel mounting and checking your filesystems. If it's hanging here, then its probably because the kernel can't find any mountable filesystems. Did you create your /etc/fstab file?
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[Thomas H. Oliver]

I re-edited fstab (removing an egregious error) then tried again with the same result. /etc/fstab looks like this:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# noatime turns of atimes for increased performance (atimes normally aren't
# needed; notail increases performance of ReiserFS (at the expense of storage
# efficiency). It's safe to drop the noatime options if you want and to
# switch between notail and tail freely.

# <fs> <mountpoint> <type> <opts> <dump/pass>

# NOTE: If your BOOT partition is ReiserFS, add the notail option to opts.
/dev/hda4 /boot ext2 noauto,noatime 1 2
/dev/hda9 / ext2 noatime 0 1
/dev/hda8 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,ro 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

# glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for
# POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink). Adding the following
# line to /etc/fstab should take care of this:
# (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will use almost no
# memory if not populated with files)

#tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0

(Sorry, I tried "Code" and "List" but I can't get Styles to work.)

Here's rc.conf, also, in case it's relevant:

# Copyright 1999-2001 Gentoo Technologies, Inc.
# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, v2 or later
# Author: Daniel Robbins <drobbins@gentoo.org>
# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/rc.conf,v 1.8 2002/03/10 22:57:28 azarah Exp $
# /etc/rc.conf: Global startup script configuration settings

# Use KEYMAP to specify the default console keymap. There is a complete tree
# of keymaps in /usr/share/keymaps to choose from. This setting is used by the
# /etc/init.d/keymaps script.

KEYMAP="us"

# CONSOLEFONT specifies the default font that you'd like Linux to use on the
# console. You can find a good selection of fonts in /usr/share/consolefonts;
# you shouldn't specify the trailing ".psf.gz", just the font name below.
# To use the default console font, comment out the CONSOLEFONT setting below.
# This setting is used by the /etc/init.d/consolefont script.

# CONSOLEFONT="default8x16"

# CONSOLETRANSALTION is the charset map file to use. Leave commented to use
# the default one. Have a look in /usr/share/consoletrans for a selection of
# map files you can use.

#CONSOLETRANSLATION="8859-1_to_uni"

# Set CLOCK to "UTC" if your system clock is set to UTC (also known as
# Greenwich Mean Time). If your clock is set to the local time, then set CLOCK
# to "local". This setting is used by the /etc/init.d/clock script.

CLOCK="local"

# Set protocols to the protocols that you plan to use. Gentoo Linux will only
# enable module auto-loading for these protocols, eliminating annoying module
# not found errors.
# Num Protocol
# 1: Unix
# 2: IPv4
# 3: Amateur Radio AX.25
# 4: IPX
# 5: DDP / appletalk
# 6: Amateur Radio NET/ROM
# 9: X.25
# 10: IPv6
# 11: ROSE / Amateur Radio X.25 PLP
# 19: Acorn Econet

# Most users want this:

PROTOCOLS="1 2"

#For IPv6 support:

#PROTOCOLS="1 2 10"

# Set NFSSERVER to yes if you want the NFS startup scripts to automatically
# start an NFS server for you.

NFSSERVER=no

# What display manager do you use ? [ xdm | gdm | kdm ]

#DISPLAYMANAGER=xdm

# XSESSION is a new variable to control what window manager to start
# default with X if run with xdm, startx or xinit. The default behavior
# is to look in /etc/X11/Sessions/ and run the script in matching the
# value that XSESSION is set to. The support scripts is smart enouth to
# look in all bin directories if it cant find a match in /etc/X11/Sessions/,
# so setting it to "enligtenment" can also work. This is basically used
# as a way for the system admin to configure a default system wide WM,
# allthough it will work if the user export XSESSION in his .bash_profile, etc.
#
# NOTE: this behaviour is overridden when a ~/.xinitrc or ~/.xsession exists
# for the particular program run ( ~/.xinitrc for startx, ... ).
#
# Defaults depending on what you install currently include:
#
# Gnome - will start gnome-session
# KDE - will start startkde
# Xsession - will start a terminal and a few other nice apps

XSESSION=KDE



# Note: achim lives in Germany, and enjoys these settings
# KEYMAP="de-latin1-nodeadkeys"
# CONSOLEFONT="iso09.f14"





#OLD SETTINGS; not currently supported
#SULOGIN=no # Set to yes if you want sulogin to be spawned on bootup
#DELAYLOGIN=yes # Set to no if you want to be able to login over telnet/rlogin
# before system startup is complete (as soon as inetd is started)


Is it possible that I hosed the kernel with some choice or other?

[Thomas H. Oliver]

P.S. I forgot to mention that both the root and the swap partitions are above the magic 1024 (tracks? cylinders?) so this could be a factor. The boot partition, however, is at the lowest addresses on the 40GB IDE disk. Except for the 100MB Linux boot partition the "lower 1024" are occupied entirely by 4 FAT16 partitions.

[Thomas H. Oliver]

Additional data on this problem: There was in fact a problem with the kernel since I had failed to enable the Device File System, contrary to the install instructions. (It's labeled EXPERIMENTAL so I couldn't imagine that it would be mandatory.) I also disabled ACPI (I think that's correct) which another forum discussion said would cause keyboard problems. In additon, I enabled kernel support for every IDE driver just in case the disk wasn't able to be accessed and also turned on and off a different selection of options, most of which I didn't understand (okay, I admit I don't know what I'm doing!). The upshot of all this was a first-boot-after-install hang following the following message:

hda: 8032MB, CHS=1024/255/63
Partition check:
hda p1 p2 <

I have no idea what this message means. My hda happens to be a 40GB one. Is Linux compatible with 8GB or smaller HD's only? I haven't read this anywhere. Maybe it's only on boot, but if so, which are the subdirectories which need to be below 1024?

I can't say if this boot got further than the last one described above, as the messages whip by so fast. I'm no longer getting the keyboard error message but it could be because that one is past the current hang point.

Any ideas, anyone?

[AlterEgo]

I feel the keyboard timeout only occurs when you enable ACPI in the Gentoo 2.4.19 kernel.

I changed back to vanilla 2.4.18 with some patches, and everything was back in working order.

[Thomas H. Oliver]

After a lengthy struggle I've finally been able to install Gentoo Linux. The problem eventually turned out to be about partitioning my hard disk. What I was trying to do was install around an existing installation of Win98, which I've never used but which I wanted to have in case Wine required it (I need Wine to run my applications until I can convert to 100% Linux). So.... When I began installing Linux I thought nothing of it when the Linux boot partition ended up as hda4, the swap as hda8, and the root as hda9. To make a long story short, I eventually tried rearranging my partitions so that boot was hda1, extended DOS was hda2, swap was hda3, and root was hda4, following which Gentoo Linux took off! My final partition configuration is as follows (on a 40GB 7200 RPM Maxtor ATA-100 disk):

/dev/hda1 Linux Boot (ext2) 100MB
/dev/hda2 DOS extended 8GB minus 100MB
/dev/hda3 Linux Swap 2GB
/dev/hda4 Linux Root (ext2) 12GB
/dev/hda5 FAT16 2GB
/dev/hda6 FAT16 2GB
/dev/hda7 FAT16 2GB
/dev/hda8 FAT16 2GB minus 100MB

I tried an expanded Linux Root partition to take up the entire remainder of the disk (might as well, since I've used up my 4 primary partitions) but the larger size partition turned out to use 16GB when empty (!) and I was afraid I'd need 32 CDROM's when I imaged it, so I cut back to 12GB.

Note that Linux FDISK will round UP if you specify a file length instead of a cylinder count, potentially giving you FAT16 sizes > 2048MB, so you might want to subtract a cylinder to keep them at 2048MB or below.

I also have two SCSI disks, the first of which contains Win2K in an NTFS partition and the second of which contains 9 DOS partitions of about 2G each (this one I use for DOS routines--first partition--and for backup image files). GRUB has no problem booting to Win2K or Linux, and in fact in my first effort when Linux Boot was hda4 GRUB was able to boot to Win98 (but it wouldn't display its splash screen! and of course I couldn't get Linux to boot at all).

At first I wanted to re-install Win98 to hda5, having destroyed it when I made hda1 my boot partition. However, Win98 INSISTS on being installed in hda1 and at the lowest disk addresses (no unformatted space below it). DOES THIS SUCK OR WHAT!!!!! Microsoft really does lead the pack in effed-up systems design! My theoretical solution to this problem is to install Win98 on the second SCSI disk, not an easy thing to do since it means disconnecting both the first SCSI disk and the IDE disk to force the installation onto the second SCSI! I'm only going to do this if I absolutely have to have Win98 for Wine. In anticipation of this I've set up menu.lst for GRUB as follows:


default 1
timeout 30
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title=Gentoo Linux Mk. I
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/bzImage root=/dev/hda4
title=Windows 2000 Pro
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1
title=Windows 98
root (hd2,0)
map (hd0) (hd2)
map (hd2) (hd0)
chainloader +1


Many thanks to everyone who contributed comments on my efforts as a newbie to get Gentoo Linux up and running (without benefit of Linux connections to the Internet, I might add--I have a used Cisco 675 on the way, so that will be my next challenge) and I hope my experience will make it a bit easier for the next victim, uh, I mean, installer!

[Swishy]

By the way ..you dont need an existing win install for wine ..if an app requires specific dll's you can usually install native win dll's in the wine dir and point the wine config to them........


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