A successful failure install (slightly long post )

Alien Orifice

Well, I've got no idea what to make of this!

I recently posted ( install not going well, fdisk possibly broken? ) about fdisk giving me grief. It turned out that it would not allow me to specify hda as the disk I wished to use. I have only one hd in this box.

In an effort to get around this I used a Suse 7.3 cd with their Yast tool and lo and behold it chose hdc as the disk(??!??) . I figured, hey it's working, go with it.

I partitioned it and exited the Suse install, rebooted and started the Gentoo stage1 install again. Just for fun, I fired up fdisk and it again balked at hda, so I specified hdc and BAM! off it went. Cool, says me.

I continued through the install guide, going along....

When I got to the bootstrap process I let it rip... the guide says 1-2 hours based on machine speed, using the authors 900Mhz Athlon as a baseline example( about 1 hour ). I have a P3 Socket 370 550Mhz so I assumed about 2 hours. It took 4 and a half!!!! Ouch.

For the most part, although it was hairy for a nOOb like me, I got through to the end! Now it gets weird....

During grub setup it reported /boot as ext2 although I specified ext3 throughout the install ( maybe it should say that? ).

Then I could not get it to umount the boot/install cd when I was ready to finally reboot. Couldn't do it in the chroot environment, or after when I umounted the other partitions per the guide. I typed reboot anyway and it sorta hung when it restarted ( my BIOS was still set to look to it first for booting ) and then made an odd sound and ejected the disk as the grub menu appeared.

I thought... ok, got the grub menu so maybe I'm ok.

As it began to load I lot of things blew by that didn't look good. Among them, I SWEAR I saw something about my cdrom drive being device hda!!! Also, although I am pretty sure device file system was selected when I compiled the kernel, it reported that devfs ( am I even talking about the right thing here? ) was not enabled and Gentoo requires it, you need it...etc.

Next there were a list of messages about the ethernet interface not happening ( it worked fine during the setup )

SIOCSIFADDR, SIOCSIFBRDADDR, SIOCSIFNETMASK, SIOCADDRT...unknown interface... no such device

obvious that the ethernet settings went south somewhere.

Finally, I did get a login prompt! I installed Gentoo from the ground up in one try, albeit with a few problems!

Anyway, does anyone think I can/should try and fix/save this install? If so, what/how would you do it/begin? I realize its a loaded question as I haven't told you all the errors ( most went by rather quick on boot ) but opinions/suggestions are good! Or, and I'm leaning this way as I believe something evil happened along the way, should I get some sleep and start over from the beginning this weekend?

Thx to all for help, and thanks to the Gentoo people for giving the gift of their time and genius to the world! Even if I never get it running right, it is time well spent learning, doing, tinkering.... :arrow:

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Instinct · n00b Joined: 02 Aug 2002 Posts: 74

Just a shot in the dark here, but is it possible you have your cdrom on your primary master IDE channel and your HD as secondary master? That's sure what it sounds like. Check it out and if so, fix that and it would probably be best to just start over on the install.

rac · Posted: Wed Sep 11, 2002 3:38 am Post subject:

BonezTheGoon · Posted: Wed Sep 11, 2002 1:39 pm Post subject:

Yeah, hdc is most certainly the master device on the second channel. So there is no debating that your hard disk is there, your CD-Rom could be anywhere other than hdc (which leaves hda hdb hdd) but it is most likely hda as master on your primary channel. I see no problem with this at all, so long as everything knows where to look (which requires you to remember this about your system.) Given grub and your /etc/fstab are correct there should really be no more hassles. In the future you might want to change them around so that you have an easier time next go around.

So for the "SIOCSIFADDR, SIOCSIFBRDADDR, SIOCSIFNETMASK, SIOCADDRT...unknown interface... no such device" You might want to check out this other thread.

As for the DevFS this was the single hardest thing for me to fix on my first few Gentoo installations. You will need to recompile your kernel. You need to follow these directions VERY CLOSELY from the Gentoo Build Document.

Alien Orifice · Posted: Wed Sep 11, 2002 6:34 pm Post subject:

Hey all, thanks for the advice.

Regarding the cdrom/hard drive issues, I did replace the mobo in this box about 3 months ago. Although I always connect my boot hd to the first primary channel ( esp. when there is only one disk as is the case here ), it is probable that I may have screwed up and connected them backward. It is a small mid-tower case so the cables are a little crowded. I will check that it is in the proper order. I would then need to recompile the kernel, re-edit grub and fstab to sort it all out I assume. Maybe I can get ext3 as the file system to stick as well.

Thoughts:
So, hda and hdb would be the primary and secondary IDE's on the first channel, and hdc and hdd would be the same on the second channel?

If I have my hd on the first channel as primary, and then the cdrom on the second channel ( both as master ) would the cd drive show up as hdc? why is there /dev/cdrom/cdrom0 then? I am a little confused ( need to do some more research it seems ).

Regarding the devfs problem, I recall it being pre-selected in the config tool for the kernel. Is there somewhere else it is set too? Also, I did not see a "USE DMA by default" option anywhere. Under IDE options there was one for PCI DMA and another that said USE DMA only for disks. I will definitely re-examine closer while fixing my other problems.

Lastly I will check out the other thread supplied by Bonez.

Alright, this weekend I attempt to save the install.... if it fails I'll start over.

-AO
_________________
My foot and your ass sure do make a great team.

Instinct · n00b Joined: 02 Aug 2002 Posts: 74

rac · Posted: Wed Sep 11, 2002 8:10 pm Post subject:

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

BonezTheGoon · Posted: Wed Sep 11, 2002 10:03 pm Post subject:

phong · Posted: Thu Sep 12, 2002 2:43 am Post subject:

When grub reports the partition as ext2 that's fine. In fact, ext3 partitions ARE ext2 partitions with special hidden journaling files. If something treats it as ext2 it will be OK, it just won't use the journaling feature. In the case of grub, there's no reason to because it doesn't write data to the partition.

If your cdrom is on /dev/hdc then that and /dev/cdrom/cdrom0 are effectively aliases for the same thing. Also, if you once you get devfs set in your kernel, it will probably fix some of the other errors you're getting. I don't think you'll probably have to start over from scratch - worse case you shouldn't have to do much more than a kernel recompile and maybe some config tweaking.
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