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pgbatch
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Joined: 24 Apr 2004
Posts: 2

PostPosted: Sat Apr 24, 2004 4:58 pm    Post subject: cant boot on ultra30 Reply with quote

Hello,

I have been trying to make an old Ultra30 sitting in a corner useful by installing gentoo-sparc64 ut all my attempts end up with a failure to boot:

...
VFS: Cannot open root device "sda4" or 08:04
...
kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:04

I followed the instructions from the Gentoo handbook, using emerge sparc-sources, (kernel 2.4.24). The first time I hadnt checked the kernel size, so I thought I might be above the 3.5M limit mentioned on it, and it turned out that with default settings, the kernel was 3.7M large, but the last attempt was only 3.0M large, and I get the same problem.

From google searches, it seems the problem is not entirely uncommon, but
the suggestions I found didnt make a difference
(i.e. for example trying to override SILO with
boot 1/boot/image root=/dev/sda1 (or sdb4)
I followed the suggested partition on the gentoo handbook (it's my first gentoo altogether): i.e. as mount points:
/dev/sda1 should be boot (tried ext2 and ext3)
/dev/sda2 is swap
/dev/sda[4-6] are /usr /var /home (ext3).

The kernel panic is preceded by a
'failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k scsi_hostadapter, errno = 2'
but I dont see how it would relate to the failure to boot.

If anyone has a suggestion of what to try/look at, it would be very welcome.
P
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spam_
Tux's lil' helper
Tux's lil' helper


Joined: 14 Jan 2004
Posts: 105
Location: /dev/null

PostPosted: Thu Apr 29, 2004 5:25 pm    Post subject: Re: cant boot on ultra30 Reply with quote

pgbatch wrote:
Hello,

I have been trying to make an old Ultra30 sitting in a corner useful by installing gentoo-sparc64 ut all my attempts end up with a failure to boot:

...
VFS: Cannot open root device "sda4" or 08:04
...
kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:04

I followed the instructions from the Gentoo handbook, using emerge sparc-sources, (kernel 2.4.24). The first time I hadnt checked the kernel size, so I thought I might be above the 3.5M limit mentioned on it, and it turned out that with default settings, the kernel was 3.7M large, but the last attempt was only 3.0M large, and I get the same problem.

From google searches, it seems the problem is not entirely uncommon, but
the suggestions I found didnt make a difference
(i.e. for example trying to override SILO with
boot 1/boot/image root=/dev/sda1 (or sdb4)
I followed the suggested partition on the gentoo handbook (it's my first gentoo altogether): i.e. as mount points:
/dev/sda1 should be boot (tried ext2 and ext3)
/dev/sda2 is swap
/dev/sda[4-6] are /usr /var /home (ext3).

The kernel panic is preceded by a
'failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k scsi_hostadapter, errno = 2'
but I dont see how it would relate to the failure to boot.

If anyone has a suggestion of what to try/look at, it would be very welcome.
P



Make sure all the necessary disk drivers are in the kernel, not modules. The modprobe error suggests to me that the kernel SCSI drivers are modules, not in the kernel as they should be. The kernel tries to run modprobe to load them but since root isn't mounted it can't run modprobe.
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Weeve
Retired Dev
Retired Dev


Joined: 30 Oct 2002
Posts: 641

PostPosted: Fri Apr 30, 2004 12:06 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

It sounds like you don't have the correct SCSI controller built into the kernel. You'll want the SYM53C8XX Version 2 SCSI support driver built into the kernel along with SCSI disk support.
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pgbatch
n00b
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Joined: 24 Apr 2004
Posts: 2

PostPosted: Fri Apr 30, 2004 8:34 pm    Post subject: thanks Reply with quote

thanks for the suggestions, they do sound like my problem, I wasnt sure about this SYM53C. Inbetween the Ultra30 has been used for other purposes
so I will retry on an Ultra10. But as it's a bank holiday, and it might take some time before I get a chance to test more, I wanted to acknowledge your answers.

Ph
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