SOLVED: Cannot find root device

beowulfenator · n00b Joined: 02 May 2012 Posts: 4

Hi!

I am installing Gentoo to my rather old Asus W5F laptop. The kernel built using "genkernel" works fine. However, I am having trouble building a custom, more optimized kernel.

The chipset is Intel 945 GM mobile. The processor is Intel Core Duo.

Which drivers do I use for HDD support? It's an older PATA hdd. I've tried several options, but all the time I get the "cannot find root device" error, which probably means the kernel doesn't see the hdd.

Any help would be appreciated.

Jaglover · Posted: Wed May 02, 2012 9:15 am Post subject:

beowulfenator,

welcome to Gentoo!

You can do lspci -k from working installation or use http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/
And it's really not the HDD support, you need a driver for HDD controller.
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beowulfenator · n00b Joined: 02 May 2012 Posts: 4

So it seems that the "ata_piix" module is used with my hdd controller.

I compile it into the kernel ([*]), but still it won't boot. Says "Cannot open root device "sda3" or unknown-block(0,0)".

py-ro · Posted: Wed May 02, 2012 10:29 am Post subject:

Try

/dev/hda3

Then search for old ata lib.

beowulfenator · n00b Joined: 02 May 2012 Posts: 4

The /dev/hda3 doesn't work either. But then somehow in the genkernel kernel the ata_piix initializes my hdd as /dev/sda. It works for sure, only not in my new kernel. Perhaps I have disabled something else that's important? I'm sure I have extfs2 and extfs3 support enabled.

Jaglover · Posted: Wed May 02, 2012 8:16 pm Post subject:

You need SCSI disk support at least, libata uses SCSI subsytem. And yes, your drive will be sda.
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beowulfenator · n00b Joined: 02 May 2012 Posts: 4

Woo-hoo! After enabling SCSI support it works!