SATA - PROBLEM SOLVED !!!!!!!!!!!!!

dacha_san · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 82

hugh, i hope this will be the last post to bother people on the forum with my installation problems. Well, wheh i start UNiversal LIveCD, it doesn`t recognize my SATA drive. So i had to reboot and to load gentoo kernel with doataraid and noapic option. After that i had to load sata_nv driver and my disk was recognized. When i issued fdisk /dev/sda command, i saw that there were partitions created for my XP (which i was using before i decided to put also Gentoo on the machine). I followed the handbook and created /boot, /, and swap partitions and saved changes to the partitions table. Everything else with the instalation went well, except my reboor after finishing installation. Grub loader shows me the list of OS, and i have options for Gentoo and for WinXP, BUT i can start WinXP without any problems, and when i try to start Gentoo i get the kernel panic message "VFS: Couldn`t mount..." Please append correct root boot option...."
Now,
grub recognizes only fd0 and hd0 disks when in command prompt on boot. No sd0 drive.
My grub conf looks like this:

timeout 30
default 0
title=Gentoo
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/kernel-my version root=/dev/sda4

title=WinXP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

My partition table is like this:

/dev/sda1 - ntfs WinXP
/dev/sda2 - ntfs
/dev/sda3 - boot
/dev/sda4 - /
/dev/sda5 - ext (win95...)
/dev/sda6 - swap

So, after reading all this, is there anubody who could help me with this issue????

One more thing to mention, because i`m not sure if it matters or not, while creating my partitions using fdisk, /dev/sda3 and /dev/sda6 were created as primary partitions, while /dev/sda6 was created as extendedd one.

Thanks in advance!!

Gherald · Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 8:50 am Post subject:

have you tried running grub manually:

# grub

and then:

grub> root (hd<TAB>

By <TAB> I mean the tab key, of course. It should present you with a list...

dacha_san · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 82

Gherald · Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 10:04 am Post subject:

Oh sorry, I misread your post completely. Have you not tried root=/dev/hd[efgh]4 ?

If you have and they don't work, post the output of:

Enlight · Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 10:11 am Post subject:

Hi!

markkuk · Guru Joined: 29 Nov 2002 Posts: 446

dacha_san · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 82

Gherald · Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 8:08 pm Post subject:

Please start by posting the output of those 2 commands I mentioned. Direct information is always helpful.

dacha_san · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 82

r3tude · n00b Joined: 12 Jan 2005 Posts: 18

I have the same problem but I noticed that when I boot with the live CD my SATA drive is detected as sda1,2,3 etc but when i finished installation it then picked it up as hdc1,2,3. i altered the grub root=/dev/sda3 to hdc3.

this gets rid of the VFS error btu still wont boot because all my configuration files are wrong using "sda" and now my filesystem will only mount read only.

I don't exactly know how SATA works with linux but did it at one point rely on SCSI emulation, I don't know if enabling SATA for my chipset in effect changed the way the drives are recognised.

Any ideas why this happened.

also when configuring grub and it asks for HD format of hd0,0 i presumed it read differently so my configuration of grub didnt use say sd,0,0 could this have altered my driive/partition names from sda to hdc.

dacha_san · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 82

Enlight · Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2005 2:28 pm Post subject:

as said problem comes from kernel!!!

1) first hard disk (in order of boot sequence in BIOS) is always hd0 for Grub, wether SATA or not

2) Edit : didn't saw the fdisk -l result, partitions are great!

==> kernel 2.6.x + nforce = sda

3) no hd sata support in your kernel, only the controller's one!!!

#

Enlight · Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2005 2:33 pm Post subject:

Just a tip :

When you boot on the live-cd do

dacha_san · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 82

dacha_san · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 82

Gherald · Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2005 5:19 pm Post subject:

actually AFAIK,

CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE_SATA =y

and

CONFIG_SCSI_SATA=y

are seperate... one will name SATA drives /dev/hd[e-h], the other as /dev/sd[a-d]

so you have to try the /dev/hd[e-h]4 as well.

It's too bad there's no clear standard.

What you could do is boot this kernel temporarily to a root partition on a spare IDE drive, then use fdisk -l to see if your kernel can actually see the SATA drive, and troubleshoot things that way.

dacha_san · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 82

Enlight · Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2005 12:10 am Post subject:

mmm... a problem never comes alone! what filesystem do you use? did you set its support in kernel settings

dacha_san · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 82

[quote="Enlight"]mmm... a problem never comes alone! what filesystem do you use? did you set its support in kernel settings

Enlight · Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2005 3:20 pm Post subject:

could you post the result of

dacha_san · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 82

dacha_san · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 82

Enlight · Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2005 5:53 pm Post subject:

CONFIG_SCSI_AIC79XX = y : can't remember but i suppose you don't need it
you can set the via scsi off

I'm just wondering a thing, as far as I remember my mobo nf7-s2 has got mcpt-s controller but nf7-s rev 2.0 have mcpt with a sata controller added, could you check about this?

Try lsmod when booting on the live cd and we should be fixed about what sata support we need here!

dacha_san · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 82

[quote="Enlight"]CONFIG_SCSI_AIC79XX = y : can't remember but i suppose you don't need it
you can set the via scsi off

I'm just wondering a thing, as far as I remember my mobo nf7-s2 has got mcpt-s controller but nf7-s rev 2.0 have mcpt with a sata controller added, could you check about this?

Try lsmod when booting on the live cd and we should be fixed about what sata support we need here![/quote

ok, here it is, booting livecd

lsmod (before i type modprobe sata_nv)

Module Size Used by
rtc 8872 0
libata 27912 0
sbp2 19464 0
ohci1394 26692 0
ieee1394 66712 2 bp2, ohci1394
usb_storage 50816 0
ohci_hcd 16700 0
uhci_hcd 25376 0
ehci_hcd 23108 0

and lsmod (after i typed/loaded modprobe sata_nv)

Module Size Used by
sata_nv 6340 0
rtc 8872 0
libata 27912 sata_nv
sbp2 19464 0
ohci1394 26692 0
ieee1394 66712 2 bp2, ohci1394
usb_storage 50816 0
ohci_hcd 16700 0
uhci_hcd 25376 0
ehci_hcd 23108 0

oh, one more question, when you say "CONFIG_SCSI_AIC79XX = y : can't remember but i suppose you don't need it
you can set the via scsi off"
Is the compiling of the kernel only way to change these options? Or there is some easier one?

Thanks

Enlight · Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2005 8:54 pm Post subject:

yes but using ccache should make it faster. I just have a doubt, each time you compile you copy the new kernel in the /boot with its Systemmap like in the installation manual? and if you have more than one kernel on your /boot you edit grub.conf???