Latest ver of Gentoo keeps locking my ASUS P4C800E Dlx sys

[john1290]

I have the latest universal LiveCD install ISO. I have a ASUS P4C800E Deluxe board and my IDE drives are hooked up to the normal 40 pin Intel connector and not the SATA. I have 3 HD's hooked into this system. C and D are on the primary IDE connector and when installing Gentoo, I have that cable PULLED as to not touch my Windows XP install. I'm trying to install to the Master IDE drive on the secondary Intel controller which holds a 60 gig drive and a CDROM. Mandrake installed perfectly in this configuration but I had some weird issues with it so moved onto another distro. Booted with the 'gentoo-nofb' kernel to see what the problem was and it keeps stopping at this part: "hda(c?...forget exactly) IDE driver: attached ide-disk driver" and it stops cold. Tried the noapm, noide, noapic, nolapic...tried turning off IDE dma mode.....nothing works. Unplugged USB devices and still nothing. I've tried turning APIC/APCI/APM etc etc off in the BIOS and no go. I know the CD is good as it boots another desktop perfectly.

Any ideas?

[madmango]

The kernel is trying to find the devices on your primary IDE port, which you have pulled. So it hangs.

what you should do is completely pull out the drives connected to the primary port, and switch the connection from the secondary port to the primary. Therefore, you linux drive and CDROM will be on the primary port, and your windows drives won't be connected.

This will get the cd to boot.

HOWEVER, if you have your first primary drive pulled, how do you expect to install your bootloader. You NEED those drives connected to put the bootloader on the MBR of the first drive. I did a similar setup back when I was a n00b like yourself. You just need to be SURE you don't ever type any command that involves /dev/hda or /dev/hdb. Whenever the install guide refrences /dev/hda, make sure you substitute /dev/hdc.

It really isn't that much of a problem if you make sure you type the right commands and double check everything. That way, you set up a bootloader (example grub) on the MBR of the first drive (the windows one) and have the option of either booting that drive or booting the linux one. A sample grub.conf would be

title Linux
root (hd2,0)
kernel (hd2,0)/bzImage root=/dev/hdc3

title Microsoft Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

I hope you can decipher this.



EDIT: you don't need to boot the nofb kernel to diagnose livecd errors, just hit f2 on the bootsplash screen.
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[WacKEDmaN]

im trying to install the 2004.2 x86 universal version of gentoo on a P4P800-E deluxe motherboard. and am having the same problems as listed here, it locks up on "attached ide-disk driver", i have only one IDE HDD installed (no SATA) and one dvd-rw drive on the same cable (tryed them both seperatly with the same results) unfortunatly madmango's fix wont work in this case.

Is there any other way to get this to boot?

[Merc248]

i had it working on legacy/compatibility mode on my P4P800-E deluxe motherboard, although of course i had to disable one of my IDE channels. i consider it a hack of a fix though, and i'd rather see a more suitable solution that enables every IDE channel in enhanced mode.