IDE channel broken... how to move?

[HopChop]

Hello!

My primary ide-channel seems broken. Can't find any drives on it but when i move them to secondary channel they exist in the bios. Gentoo loads fine until all mounts will take place. It tries to mount hda and hdb, but all mounts are now at hdc. How should I fix this? I tried to boot on the cd but it didn't work, got some "can't decide boot partition size"-error. I also tried to boot on some debian floppys but couldn't find the files to edit.

[AlterEgo]

Theoreticallly, I think you should be able to boot from CD, even without a functioning IDE channel.

Once you've booted:

1) You need to edit your bootmanager config file: lilo.conf, or the grub-equivalent (sorry, don't use grub).
2) Fix /etc/fstab

That should be all

[HopChop]

Well, the problem is that I can't boot on the gentoo cd, don't know if it's because the cd-rom now is located on secondary ide channel or what's the problem is. Any other advices?

[afreeman]

This sounds like a hardware problem. Try this:

1) Replace the IDE cable. You would be surprised how often 50 cent cables cause these sorts of problems. If that doesn't help, do:

2) Go into the bios and disable the offending IDE channel, and also set the drive autodetect for both devices on that channel to 'none'.

3) Connect your HD and cdrom to the other channel, with the HD jumpered as the 'master' and the cdrom jumpered as the slave.

4) Make sure that 'boot from cdrom' is enabled in the bios.

That should do it; gentoo and your bios will no longer 'see' the broken channel, and everything should be cool. In effect, your computer now has only one IDE channel (a primary), so all settings should default back to their typical values (e.g. hda for HD, etc.).

Finally, note that some motherboards only support nifty features like ultradma on the primary channel, so you might be SOL on that, but at least the computer will be functional.

-Aaron

[pilla]

Moving from Installing Gentoo to Hardare & Laptops.