Problems installing on a scsi drive [solved]

[overzero]

Greetings,

I would like to install on a SCSI drive but I am having lots of issues. Currently, the machine has RHEL3 installed so I know that its possible.

First of all, I cant see the hard drive with the 2006.1 live CD. I booted with the doscsi option but there is no output when I run

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fdisk -l /dev/sda

This is not my real issue however because I can mount the partition from the RHEL installation. I have installed a gentoo tarball and I can chroot into the gentoo installation. I built a kernel and all that but when I try to boot into the kernel I get

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Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0) 

I am positive that I am passing the correct "root=" kernel parameter and that the appropriate file system module is compiled into the kernel. I am less confidant that I have the correct driver for the SCSI host adapter but I have tried almost everything.

What else could it be?

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$ lspci
00:00.0 Memory controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 Memory Controller (rev a3)
00:01.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 ISA Bridge (rev a3)
00:01.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation CK804 SMBus (rev a2)
00:02.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 USB Controller (rev a2)
00:02.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 USB Controller (rev a3)
00:04.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 AC'97 Audio Controller (rev a2)
00:06.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK804 IDE (rev f2)
00:07.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK804 Serial ATA Controller (rev f3)
00:08.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK804 Serial ATA Controller (rev f3)
00:09.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCI Bridge (rev a2)
00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 Ethernet Controller (rev a3)
00:0e.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev a3)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
00:19.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:19.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:19.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:19.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
05:05.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB22/A IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)
0a:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G70GL [Quadro FX4500] (rev a1)
61:06.0 SCSI storage controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53c1030 PCI-X Fusion-MPT Dual Ultra320 SCSI (rev 07)
61:06.1 SCSI storage controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53c1030 PCI-X Fusion-MPT Dual Ultra320 SCSI (rev 07)

Possibly useless info. The tarball mentioned above is a 2005.1. I need this because I want the default compiler to be gcc-3.4. The RHEL installation is running a 2.4 kernel but I still seem to be able to chroot into to the 2005.1 gentoo installation. I dont think this is a problem but I figured it might confuse some people.

Frank

[PMcCauley]

Apparently you need

device drivers -> Fusion MPT device support -> Fusion MPT ScsiHost drivers for SPI

Article: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php? ... 3ad20cee18


Patrick

[overzero]

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately its not that easy. I have this driver compiled into the kernel.

Frank

[PMcCauley]

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately its not that easy. I have this driver compiled into the kernel.

Frank

Ok well it was worth a shot. Perhaps the problem lies in you grub configuration or fstab file, even if you are certain these are correct might as well post them here you never know what we might come up with. Maybe it is possible to boot off another hard drive or even boot a ram drive to check from there. Maybe even another live cd.

Patrick

[timeBandit]

What happens if you boot the Red Hat kernel with the Gentoo root device? Joy, or no joy?

[overzero]

Thanks for the suggestions. Here is the appropriate information.

sda2 is the /boot partition.
sda3 is the RHEL root.
sda5 is swap.
sda6 is the Gentoo root.

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# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 36.4 GB, 36420075520 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4427 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *         1        67    538146    6  FAT16
/dev/sda2            68        80    104422+  83  Linux
/dev/sda3            81      2126  16434495   83  Linux
/dev/sda4          2127      4427  18482782+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5          2127      2380   2040223+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6          2381      4427  16442496   83  Linux

# cat /mnt/gentoo/etc/fstab

/dev/sda2   /boot     ext2   noauto,noatime        1 2
/dev/sda6   /         ext3   noatime               0 1
/dev/sda5   none      swap   sw                    0 0
proc        /proc     proc   defaults              0 0
shm         /dev/shm  tmpfs  nodev,nosuid,noexec   0 0

# cat /boot/grub/menu.lst

default=1
timeout=10

title Gentoo
   root (hd0,1)
   kernel /kernel-2.6.19-gentoo-r5 root=/dev/sda6

title Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS (2.4.21-40.ELsmp)
   root (hd0,1)
   kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.21-40.ELsmp ro root=LABEL=/ hda=ide-scsi
   initrd /initrd-2.4.21-40.ELsmp.img

Booting the Red Hat kernel with the gentoo root partition also results
in a kernel panic but I think it at least mounts / first.

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EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
pivotroot: pivot_root (/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed: 2
umount /initrd/proc failed: 2
Freeing unused kernel memory: 228K freed
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

I have noticed that the gparted Live CD version 0.3.4-5 can see the scsi
drive. I will take a look at how they configure the kernel and see what
I can find. Its even based on gentoo! Looks like its created with
Catalyst. Nice.

If that doesn't work. I have an IDE drive I can put in this machine and
see if I can boot with that as the root drive.

Frank

[timeBandit]

Booting the Red Hat kernel with the gentoo root partition also results
in a kernel panic but I think it at least mounts / first.

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EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
pivotroot: pivot_root (/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed: 2
umount /initrd/proc failed: 2
Freeing unused kernel memory: 228K freed
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

I didn't think it would just work but it was worth a try, and does give a data point indicating neither Grub nor the fs is the problem.

When you have any kernel booted that works properly--LiveCD, RHEL, whatever--check for the existence of /proc/config.gz. If found, zcat it to a file you can see while working on the Gentoo kernel config. It lists all the config options for the running kernel. Diff'ing that with your custom setup should help you pinpoint the missing pieces.

[overzero]

Victory!

The problem was ACPI. If I use APM instead, the kernel boots. I probably don't even need power management at all. I was blindly using ACPI because I always have.

I find this very surprising. Does this make any sense to anybody?

Thanks for the suggestions. Im a happy hacker again!

Frank