fdisk in 2004.2 amd64 minimal can't find HD

BillyDoc

Hi Everyone,

Sorry to be so stupid, I have zero experience with Linux of any flavor . . . but I like the idea of Gentoo very much and am trying to learn. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get past something that I suspect is very basic. For some reason I can't get anything to recognize the HD using 2004.2 amd64 minimal . . . but 2004.2 x86 minimal will see it with no problem.

My system is built around a Tyan Thunder K8W board with two 246's and 4 gig of memory. The HD is an array of 6 scsi drives controlled by a LSI U320-2 Megaraid controller set up as raid 5-0 (two raid 5 arrays with interleaved reads, which makes it VERY fast). I think that the HD setup is transparent to the processors via the controller, but I'm not positive of that. Just to make sure all the hardware worked, I installed Suse 9.1 for amd64 and . . . well it ain't windoze is it? Wow. I played with that for a while, but I really have to have some flavor of windows for my work (Mechanical Desktop, Hypermill, Solidworks, etc.). I was originally planning on installing Gentoo and running win 2K under vmware . . . but I understand from the forums that this is somewhat less than reliable at this point. So, I am trying to set up a dual-boot system with win 2k and Gentoo.

The total HD space is roughly 140 gig, so I installed Windoze first and allocated 32 gig to the first partition. Then I booted up the 2004.2 amd64 livecd and attempted to fdisk /dev/sda but it came back with unable to open /dev/sda. After messing with this every way I could think of, and going to the forums for clues I found someone suggesting that I go to the 2004.2 x86 minimal livecd (sorry I can't remember who made that suggestion), which I did. I rebooted with the x86 livecd and . . . well, well, no problem. I made three new partitions and installed file systems. Using the x86 cd, the p command gives me this:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 3985 32009481 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 3986 4002 136552+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 4003 4065 506047+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/sda4 4066 17870 110888662+ 83 Linux

I also went ahead and installed file systems (ext2 on sda2 and reiserfs 3.6 on sda4) and did mkswap and swapon. Then I hit reset and rebooted with the 2004.2 amd64 livecd after first checking that the windoze installation was still there (it was).

Unfortunately, fdisk is still unable to open /dev/sda and to see if anything else could see the drive I also tried to re-install reiserfs on /dev/sda4, but no luck. Someone in one forum entry suggested trying modprobe ide-disk and I tried to guess what instruction would work with scsi (modprobe scsi-disk?) but nothing worked. At this point I am at a total loss about how to proceed. Any ideas at all will be greatly appreciated!
_________________
Fascism n. A philosophy or system of government that advocates or exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with an ideology of belligerent nationalism.

BillyDoc · Posted: Sat Aug 21, 2004 9:51 pm Post subject:

Um, it's been a couple of days now . . . was my post just so dumb that nobody would bother to respond? I'm very sorry about that, but I really don't know how to proceed at this point. What should I do?
_________________
Fascism n. A philosophy or system of government that advocates or exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with an ideology of belligerent nationalism.

Lews_Therin · l33t Joined: 03 Oct 2003 Posts: 657 Location: Banned

It sounds like your amd64 disk might be bad...I'm not sure why else it would have a problem when the standard x86 disk works fine. Check the md5 on the .iso that you downloaded, and if it's correct then try burning a new disk with it.

If that fails, just install a normal 32 bit Gentoo, then recompile as 64 bit later.

Pajarico · Posted: Sun Aug 22, 2004 12:18 pm Post subject:

Hi, please check if your scsi array can be accesed in a different way (/dev/hda for example), and then load the ide-disk module. Im not sure if this will work (probably im wrong).

Also try to boot the livecd with 'gentoo noapic'.

Good luck.

BillyDoc · Posted: Sun Aug 22, 2004 4:37 pm Post subject:

Thanks Pajarico and Lews_Therin for your replys!

This is what I have tried so far:

Downloaded the iso from a different mirror, checked md5 sums (everything ok) burned a new disk - no difference, still can't see sda with fdisk or cfdisk

Tried booting amd64 2004.2 with noacip flag - no difference

Tried fdisk /dev/hda (amd64 2004.2) - this gets me my old ls120 disk drive (which is ide) but nothing else

Tried cfdisk /dev/sda (amd64 2004.2) - this returns "FATAL ERROR: cannot open disk drive"

Tried using the 2004.1 amd64 minimal - and it works fine!

Tried using the 2004.2 amd64 universal - and it is the same as the minimal, fdisk can't see sda

Tried the 2004.2 amd64 universal again, just to be sure and the boot didn't complete! It spewed a bunch of stuff too fast to read and ended with a screen full of lines saying "vt: argh, driver_data is NULL !"

Asside from being more than a little disappointed that my computer can boot two different ways from the same disk, the "driver_data is NULL" thing that popped up seems like a clue!

Where would this driver_data normally be located? Does anybody have any more ideas?
_________________
Fascism n. A philosophy or system of government that advocates or exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with an ideology of belligerent nationalism.

Pajarico · Posted: Sun Aug 22, 2004 8:06 pm Post subject:

Try booting with "gentoo doscsi".

BillyDoc · Posted: Sun Aug 22, 2004 8:21 pm Post subject:

Thanks again Pajarico, sounds like a very good idea . . . but it didn't work. Same result, "unable to open /dev/sda."

I'm beginning to think that there is something about my MegaRaid controller that the latest distro doesn't recognize.
_________________
Fascism n. A philosophy or system of government that advocates or exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with an ideology of belligerent nationalism.

jfave · Posted: Sun Aug 22, 2004 8:33 pm Post subject:

correct me if I am wrong, but doesnt the livecd get "upgraded" to the latest install once you download whatever stage you choose? I would say use whatever livecd works and go from there. I appologize if perhaps I am misunderstanding the situation.

Pajarico · Posted: Sun Aug 22, 2004 11:34 pm Post subject:

In the minimal cd the stages are downloaded, but before you do so you have to setup the partitions and the net connection. If you're unable to open the partitions there's nothing to do and that's the problem.

BillyDoc have you searched the forums?

BillyDoc · Posted: Tue Aug 24, 2004 2:24 pm Post subject:

Hi Pajarico and jfave,

It seems like that forum maintenance took forever!

Yes, I did search the forums before posting but I didn't find anything helpful, or at least anything I could understand. I think that jfave's idea is basically a good one though, except that I need to make a complete 32 bit install and then convert over from that. I hate the idea, as I know that I'll end up with a bunch of new problems having to do with the conversion to 64 bit . . . but WTF, I'm playing with Gentoo as much to learn as to have a working operating system anyway. Although . . . a working system would be nice!

Any suggestions about doing a 32 bit install and then converting? I know that there is some forum discussion on converting but I haven't had a chance to go look yet. Work is definitely the bane of the Computing Classes.
_________________
Fascism n. A philosophy or system of government that advocates or exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with an ideology of belligerent nationalism.

ulysses_cruz · n00b Joined: 08 Apr 2004 Posts: 66 Location: Chicago, IL

Hi

I have a MegaRAID card also, and I needed to load the driver before I could access the RAID array under the livecd

BillyDoc · Posted: Tue Aug 24, 2004 3:47 pm Post subject:

THAT WAS IT!!!!!!!

Thank you ulysses_cruz, the modprobe did the trick!

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

I'm installing now!

Bill
_________________
Fascism n. A philosophy or system of government that advocates or exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with an ideology of belligerent nationalism.

ulysses_cruz · n00b Joined: 08 Apr 2004 Posts: 66 Location: Chicago, IL

Glad to help, good luck with the rest of your install

_________________
If it were'nt for the voices in my head, I'd go insane from loneliness.
-Me, Myself and I

Iwill DK8X, 2x Opteron 244, 8x 512Mb PC2700, Geforce FX5600, Audigy 2 ZS Plat., MegaRAID SATA150-6

jfave · Posted: Tue Aug 24, 2004 5:03 pm Post subject:

it always is a modprobe something... is there an easy way to figure this out?

ulysses_cruz · n00b Joined: 08 Apr 2004 Posts: 66 Location: Chicago, IL

Maybe if they switched to udev on the livecd it would catch more of these module issues. I just re-installed last weekend with the 2004.2 livecd, and I had to modprobe sk98lin for my network, ide-disk for my root drive and megaraid for my RAID array.

_________________
If it were'nt for the voices in my head, I'd go insane from loneliness.
-Me, Myself and I

Iwill DK8X, 2x Opteron 244, 8x 512Mb PC2700, Geforce FX5600, Audigy 2 ZS Plat., MegaRAID SATA150-6

jfave · Posted: Wed Aug 25, 2004 7:19 am Post subject:

lspci would show what is on the system even if the modules have not been loaded correct?

ulysses_cruz · n00b Joined: 08 Apr 2004 Posts: 66 Location: Chicago, IL

I believe it should. The problem is figuring out which module is needed for any particular piece of hardware.
_________________
If it were'nt for the voices in my head, I'd go insane from loneliness.
-Me, Myself and I

Iwill DK8X, 2x Opteron 244, 8x 512Mb PC2700, Geforce FX5600, Audigy 2 ZS Plat., MegaRAID SATA150-6