Re: System problems

On Sun, 2011-03-20 at 21:13 -0500, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> I also suspect What Jean-Marc said is the problem. I'd recommend 
> completely disabling everything in the old ATA section to ensure it 
> doesn't attempt to control any devices, while building the PATA driver 
> into the kernel and using root=/dev/sdXN in the grub parameters.

If I use the stock configuration from the 2.6.36-gentoo-r5 kernel, won't
this have the correct basic kernel facilities built in, at least as far
as the deprecated IDE capabilities are concerned and the libata
replacement?  I assume the Gentoo devs modify kernels so that the
default config settings are more appropriate than those which come with
the vanilla kernel from the kernel devs, yes?

Putting "root=/dev/sda4" on the kernel cmd line in grub actually worked,
and got me a bit further in the boot process.  The kernel obviously
understood it.  However later in the boot process, I got "Checking the
root filesystem", following by an error message that the root filesystem
spec of /dev/sda4 wasn't understood.  This is a complaint about the root
fs spec is in /etc/fstab, since I had been using a UUID spec there, and
got an error at the same point in the boot-up about the UUID instead.

> The module approach should also work, but I always get a little 
> suspicious that it might build something else into the kernel 
> unnecessarily that causes problems.

I don't know.  According to the the ebuild notes with udev, the IDE
facility in the kernel is completely depricated and needs to be turned
off entirely to prevent unexpected results.  If I build IDE as a module,
my concern is that the module will get auto-loaded and I'll be back in
the same boat.  So I'll use a more recent kernel and turn IDE off
altogether and we'll see what happens.

> 
> > My next step is to completely rebuild the kernel, using the config built
> > into the distributed kernel source, making only the necessary mods for
> > the box's hardware needs.  I'll find a time window during the next few
> > days to work on this.
> 
> It might be a worthwhile step to boot from a LiveCD and run `lspci -k` 
> to identify the kernel modules.

lsmod will probably give the same useful information.

>  If the pciutils version on the CD is too 
> old, `pcimodules` might work instead.

Nope.  The my rescue CD is up-to-date.

Thanks!

-- 
Lindsay Haisley       | "Everything works if you let it"
FMP Computer Services |   (The Roadie)
512-259-1190          |
http://www.fmp.com    |