Gentoo hangs in boot.. (dm-multipath, custom format hand ??)

[te36]

Installed latest gentoo according to handbook last month, and it booted "fine", but yesterday it must have stopped, and now when rebooting, it hangs after trying to insmod "dm-multipath.ko". I commented that out, now it gets past next point "setting system clock using the hardware clock [UTC]", but then last message is "loading custom binary format handlers".
Q1: what should i do ?

Q2: hardware is running a 32 bit version of gentoo for > 10 years now, but procastinated to update, so this is a new install on a separate root partition. The 32 bit gentoo still boots and runs fine, grub boot partition code is also still from 32 bit install.

I actually can not get the 32 bit grub installation to load the 64 bit kernel ramdisk. Is that a bug or a feature ? Thats why the 64 bit kernel must be trying to load kernel modules from /lib. But i am a bit worried of killing the working grub install, so that i wouldn't even be able to boot back into the 32 bit gentoo to help me recover/fix the 64bit install...

[te36]

Ok.. the main problem seems to have been a hardware problem. Something i wouldn't be able to invent:

On the (unused) PCIe graphics card, there where two bulging electrolyte capacitors - and they had started to press against the underside of the next-slot PCIe card. Which must have caused some shortcut or other problem. Once i had removed that other PCIe card, the PC would boot correctly. Once i removed the old craphics card and replaced the othrer PCIe card, it would still boot, so seemingly no permanent damage on that other card (DD Cine S2 V6.5).

Still wondering about he non-botability of the initramfs in grub though...

[NeddySeagoon]

te36,

We have a canned search View unanswered posts in the top right of most or the pages in the forums.
Many helpers use that. When you reply to yourself, as you have here, your topic drops out of that search.

If you can use a soldering iron, replace all the electrolytic capacitors on that card. With two failing the rest won't be far behind.
Its not a job to learn to solder though.

When grub loads the kernel and initrd, it's all data to grub. Grub will load anything.
It only becomes code when something tries to execute it. In this case, the kernel.
You should see a lot of kernel messages before that happens though, do you get anything on the console?
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.