Kernel Panic! Still can't boot Gentoo even with Lilo

crimson

I had some troubles with grub, and decided forget it, I'm going to just use lilo. Anyway, here is my situation, I hope somebody can help me out, or walk me through it.

Gentoo calls my one and primary hard drive HDE. I have

HDE1 -- Windows 2000: fat32
HDE2 -- Extended
HDE5 -- /boot: ext3
HDE6 -- swap
HDE7 -- /root: ext3
HDE8 -- /home: ext3

I installed lilo to hde7. I use the windows boot loader and lilo loads fine, but I boot into gentoo and get:
...
loading hard drives, devices, etc...
...

ds: no socket drivers loaded!
VFS: Cannot open root device "2107" or 21:07
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic : VFS : Unable to mount root fs on 21:07

hmm, well I tried changing my lilo.conf root= to both my /dev/hde7 (root) and /dev/hde5(boot).. Neither worked.. I will post my lilo.conf at the bottom of this message along with the error I got when running /sbin/lilo during setup.

Lilo error was:

modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-3

(it scrolled this quite a few times, then added the windows and Gentoo boot options).. It actually wasn't lilo that dumped this, because I typed lilo > /error.txt and only got : added *Gentoo, Windows.

Here is my lilo.conf file:

boot = /dev/hde5
prompt
map = /boot/System.map
lba32
delay = 50
vga = normal # Normal VGA console
image = /boot/bzImage
root = /dev/hde7
label = Gentoo
read-only # read-only for checking

other = /dev/hde1
#other = /devices/discs/disc0/part1
label = Windows
table = /dev/hde

Any ideas whats going on? I have yet to boot into Gentoo!

I had so much trouble with grub I just wanted to install a different distro, but I decided I'd stick it out and try once more because this seems like an excellent distro! I want KDE3 damnit

.. Well I hope someone can help.

klieber

crimson · Posted: Fri May 03, 2002 2:21 pm Post subject:

Yeah, I've got an ASUS a7v266-e. It's got the primary IDE, secondary, and then the 2 promise ide slots as well. But I only use the primary, and the secondary. Primary for hard drive, Secondary for CD-ROM. If I wanted I could add up to 8 hard drives.

Mandrake 8.1 detected my hard drive as HDE as well, however older kernels (?) didn't, JBLinux and Slackware called it HDA. I can guarantee my hard drive is connected to the primary slot. I really hope someone can help, I know it's kind of a long post to read through, but I wanted to give enough details to make sure you guys knew what the problem was.

Thanks - Adam

klieber · Posted: Fri May 03, 2002 2:35 pm Post subject:

Welp -- I'm not a lilo expert, so I can't offer much help there. (except the standard: read the FAQ, check the man page, etc., etc.)

However, I can say that I've had extremely good luck with using grub as the *primary* boot loader (i.e. loaded in the MBR). It hands off control to the Win2K boot loader when I want to boot into windows and was a piece of cake to set up (once I got used to the odd way it addresses hd partitions)

Given that Gentoo uses grub, I'd say you'll have more luck getting grub help here than you will lilo help.

Also, just as a WAG, try disabling the promise controller in your BIOS (assuming you're not using it) The HDE thing still looks fishy.

--kurt
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crimson · Posted: Fri May 03, 2002 3:40 pm Post subject:

I've tried grub! It did the same thing! Yeah.. the help for using grub was basically : try emerge lilo then set it up. I do have everything in Bios disabled. I guess I'll just find a different distro, and hope JBLinux gets version 2.5 out pretty soon

because I can't figure out how to get gentoo to boot on my system.

Gulliver · Posted: Fri May 03, 2002 6:56 pm Post subject:

Hi,

jave you enabled your RAID-Controller in the BIOS? If yes, and you don't use it, disable it.
The Linux-Kernel detects the 4 RAID Slots as before the "normal" ones, so they get hda - hdd.
You can also try to replace in the lilo-conf hde with hda, because it's possible, that LILO detect them in "normal" order.

Hope this will help you!
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Many greetings from Germany,
Julian

crimson · Posted: Sat May 04, 2002 1:05 am Post subject:

First I'd like to thank you guys for prompting me to try a few different things, none as of yet have worked but they helped me find out what was happening.

It seems that I have found the problem! But I'm not quite sure how to fix it. I must go skateboarding first

. Then I will try and get this worked out.

-My 3rd and fourth ide controllers are disabled, or at least as much as possible from the bios. This I have done before.

-I thought this wouldn't work but I tried anyway, setting up lilo to boot HDA in lilo.conf. I ran lilo and got : Fatal! open /dev/hda5 no such device or address; as I expected. Booting from the Gentoo CD it really does detect my primary hard drive as HDE.

However, booting from the hard drive I noticed while the boot steps were flying past that it then detects my hard drive as HDA! So.. What I need to figure out is how to get lilo to update the lilo.conf file to boot /dev/hda while the system detects no device there.

Any suggestions? I'll try just editing lilo.conf, saving, then not running lilo.
Thanks for help everyone --- Adam Knutson

fghellar · Posted: Sat May 04, 2002 4:18 am Post subject:

I also have something like this with a Soyo Dragon+. My Gentoo 1.0rc6 install (kernel 2.4.17-r5) sees my hd as hda, and my Gentoo 1.1a install (kernel 2.4.19-r1) sees it as hde. In my menu.lst, I have:

lain iwakura · Guest

I had a similar problem on my asus KT133 av1007 (?) motherboard with the promise controller builtin.

When setting up your kernel options, make sure you compile the right drivers in for your hardware. Compiling in VIA82CXXX support and Promise PDC202 suport did the trick for me., but I'm not sure if this will work for you.

when you boot up from your HD, watch for messages before that "VFS error" comes up. It might say something like, " [hardware] detected but not compiled in." So, recompile with the required support.

handsomepete · Posted: Wed May 08, 2002 2:07 am Post subject:

This probably isn't related, but I'd like a little clarification anyways - I thought that you could only boot linux off of a primary (not extended) partition. I've read this 'fact' before but never tried to prove it wrong. Could someone enlighten me please?

crimson · Posted: Thu May 09, 2002 3:54 am Post subject:

A little off topic, but I learned this after setting up Gentoo, so yes and no. An extended partition as far as I know can't actually be formatted even. But.. in FDisk you create other partitions inside that extended partition and they become bootable, formattable, etc. So for me HDE2 would be my extended partition while HDE 5,6,7,8 would be in that extended partition.

As of now, I tried a ton of solutions for my problem and will try again some time, but for now I just really want Linux back on my computer so I'm going to use a different distro for a while.

fghellar

fghellar · Posted: Thu May 09, 2002 9:08 am Post subject:

I've just tested the ide=reverse option, and it works fine. So, if you decide to try again, just use it. You can also use it with the install cd by typing rescue ide=reverse at the first prompt, instead of just hitting enter.
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funsize · Posted: Thu May 09, 2002 5:57 pm Post subject: ds: no socket drivers loaded!