Gentoo 2006.0 CD hates me, and I hate it.

[8-bitDesigner]

Okay, this one's complicated, so if any devs are listening, I'd appreciate the help.

So, I have a Powermac 8500, which is stuffed to the gills with spiffy new hardware which means it performs... well, like a marginally faster Powermac 8500.

Now, I was running Gentoo 2005.1 quite happily when I found a new 120 gig drive to swap the system over to. However, in the process of swapping devices back and forth, my /dev/.udev directory got hosed, and my root partition needed a quick fsck. Long story short, I typed mkfs.reiserfs instead of fsck.reiserfs.

Oops.

Anyways, I have my /usr and /var directories backed up, along with all my portage data, so I decided to try the 2006.0 install.

Well, it boots up just fine, I can happily report, but I'm having a horror of a time trying to format my disks, spiffy new 120g, and the old one.

mac-fdisk lets me go through the motions of partitioning the disk, but trying to write any data to either disk results in the operation failing, and the disk requiring a reinitialization. I partition, hit "mkswap /dev/sdb2", and if I hit "mac-fdisk /dev/sdb" it reports that the disk has no partition table.

The hard drives in question are running OS 9.2.2 perfectly and were happily chugging along with Gentoo last week, so I'm a wee bit suspicous.

Any ideas? I'm thinking about just reinstalling with 2005.1, but I can't be bothered grabbing the 2005.0 ramdisk just yet. Currently giving it one more try, and it that fails, I'll start digging through the kernel logs for pertinent error messages. Nothing's jumped out as an error thusfar, just "IN from bad port 61 at c01ff34", which repeats for about 100 lines when the kernel inits. However, I ran into this when I was running a healthy 2005.1 system too, so I don't know what to make of it.

[iMike]

Just my 2 cents worth... I have some G3s (B&W) and G4s under Gentoo. The 2006.0 livecd appears to be a step backwards from 2005.1 (e.g., one must use the nodetect kernel options on B&W Macs with 2006.0 and modprobe pcilynx crashes, modprobe reiserfs appears to work but mkreiserfs just outputs version info and will not actually make a reiserfs). I could get everything I wanted using 2005.1 (lvm, resierfs) with little problem. I have yet to successfully make any machine using the 2006.0 livecd. I put some bug reports in bugzilla. They got immediately marked "NOFIX". Could be I'm too dumb. Like I said, just my 2 cents.
/iMike

[8-bitDesigner]

Well I can partition my disks in OS9 to my heart's content, so I highly doubt it's my hardware going bad. I'm also noticing that "modprobe floppy" causes a kernel panic. Bugzilla eh? If I find a way to copy a stack dump off with limited tools and no floppy disk, I may submit a report about the floppy issue.

[JoseJX]

Can you check dmesg? What kind of hardware do you have stuffed in there? 2006.0 works fine with my stock 8500/180, it was my test machine for the 2006.0 release. The floppy issue was a kernel issue, it should be fixed in 2.6.16.

As for the problems with the B+W G3s, the workaround is to use the nodetect kernel option, it should boot fine then. If you don't want to do this, the 2005.1 release is a perfectly fine workaround, just boot with that and then use the 2006.0 release stages instead of the 2005.1 versions. As far as I know, none of the Gentoo devs have a b+w G3 machine. They're finicky to begin with and have always caused trouble for Gentoo. I'm sorry you were having trouble with it, but there really isn't much we can do at this point. We'll keep it in mind for the next release.
_________________
Gentoo PPC FAQ: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-ppc-faq.xml

[8-bitDesigner]

Hey Jose, I'm actually pretty surprised that it's having as much trouble as it is, as I remember that you have the same system I do... kinda.

The extra hardware is pretty standard;

• Sonnet Crescendo G3 450, 1mb cache (original mobo cache is removed)
  
• 256mb RAM from MacGurus.com (2x 168-pin 5-volt, 64-bit, Extended Data Out (EDO) 60ns DIMMs)
  
• PCI ATI Radeon 7000, 32mb
  
• VT6421 Chipset SATA card (random manufacturer)
  
• Misc USB controller
  

I'll grab the lspci output when I get back home, so I can give you something a little more concrete.

Oh, and the disks are...

• WD120 - Western Digital 120g 5400rpm
  
• Seagate Barracude - 12g 5400rpm
  
• The original 10-year old SCSI-2, 2g disk
  

Is the 2.6.16 kernel included in the newest 2006 install CD? I'll see what I can do to grab the dmesg output.

Random question, as the "IN from bad port" may refer to the PCI port, I swapped my PCI cards around a bit to test it, and found (oddly) that the 1st slot (under the CPU card) works perfectly for all cards, but the 2nd port gives my USB card fits, and this is where I normally keep the SATA controller (normal card order: 1. Radeon, 2. SATA, 3. USB). I still get the same errors with the SATA card in the other slots[/list].

[JoseJX]

No, the InstallCD contains a 2.6.15 kernel, 2.6.16 wasn't available when we released. The "in from bad port" messages are either from serial devices that don't exist on your machine, from the ibm i8042 keyboard controller card or some other similar piece of hardware. They shouldn't be harmful.
_________________
Gentoo PPC FAQ: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-ppc-faq.xml

[cchapman]

I have the same issue on my iBook G4... I have found the problem to be that the ppc32 kernel on the live CD is an SMP kernel.... This makes my iBook hang just typing in it..
i use this to boot with and it seems to be fairly stable for the most part

[Kyrbo]

[8-bitDesigner]

Yep, it's the 2006 install cd alright. I'm wagering that either the fdisk/parted tools were mis-compiled, or the kernel's bandit I/O support is wonky. I'm no dev, so I'm probably way off. Anyways, I loaded up 2005.0's bootX settings, and the 2005.1 install CD, and it worked perfectly on the first try. Now I'm going to see if I can still install 2006 onto my freshly partitioned/formatted drive!

Jose, do you still want the dmesg output for debug whatnot?