boot hangs on compaq dc7700

hoover · n00b Joined: 22 Sep 2003 Posts: 20

Hi folks,

I've been trying unsuccessfully to boot 2006.1 live cd on a compaq dc7700 (intel core duo, sata 80 gb disk) which I plan using as my work desktop. I've tried the gentoo-nofb image with the following arguments:

noapic nolapic acpi=off

but the system hangs when the kernel tries to scan the pci devices.

Has anyone got gentoo to work on this hardware?

If you need more details, please let me know.

Thanks in advance & looking forward to hearing from you,

uwe

ps: detailed h/w specs can be found on compaq's site here:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/CoreRedirect.jsp?redirectReason=DocIndexPDF&prodSeriesId=3232028&targetPage=http%3A%2F%2Fh20000.www2.hp.com%2Fbc%2Fdocs%2Fsupport%2FSupportManual%2Fc00765867%2Fc00765867.pdf

mueli · Posted: Sun Dec 17, 2006 5:31 pm Post subject: HP dc77000, Intel 965

Hi,

i am now using two of this HP workstations at my office. I also had a lot of problems with this hardware, but I was able to boot with the two options on a 2006.1 amd64 gentoo CD

gentoo-nofb noapic acpi=off

Now I am using the unstable linux-2.6.19-gentoo-r1 on this machines with amd64 profile. If you, or anybody else, are still interested in more infos don't hesitate to post. I am sure there are a lot of other people out there having problems with this HP.

greetings,

michael

p.s.: one of these machines I am using in Xinerama mode with the optional DVI Card. That's until now not really stable but it works and may be interesting for others!

Freespirit · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Aug 2003 Posts: 84

mueli,

I would love some more info on how you got gentoo running on one of these beasts. I am currently running Kubuntu on mine (it was the only distro I could get to install, and its kind of unstable) an trying to install gentoo from there. My current problem is being unable to access the root disk when booting the kernel. Which SATA driver are you using?

Regards

Freespirit

whitesanjuro · n00b Joined: 17 Nov 2006 Posts: 11

I spent all weekend trying to get Gentoo working on an HP DC7700 (E6300, 2GB RAM) to no avail. When I boot off the 2007.0 livecd I use the option pci=nommconf and this works great. The autodetection of hardware bit takes quite a long time, but once I am into the system, it runs quite well, compiles quickly, etc.

After finishing the install, however, the system is insanely slow upon reboot - it literally takes about 10 minutes to go from Grub -> login prompt. I have tried a variety of kernel options and configs, to no avail. I thought it may be just a slow HD, but I tested with hdparm -tT /dev/sda and I get hueg numbers back (~280MB / 55MB), so it's not the HD. Any suggestions as to how to get this workstation functional would be much appreciated.

bgraw3 · Posted: Tue Sep 04, 2007 5:52 pm Post subject:

I was having problems with HP dc7700's based on the Pentium D (not the core 2 duo). I could boot with acpi=off or pci=nommconf, but I consistently had strange problems. (I added another NIC to the machine, and it would land on top of the other NIC or be configured as eth3 instead of eth0.) At first, the hard drives were seen as IDE (hda, hdb) instead of SATA (sda, sdb).

On these particular machines, I went into the BIOS and changed the SATA card from IDE to RAID. After you do that, the acpi sata driver works fine. I'm NOT using the BIOS RAID. It just makes the kernel see the SATA card instead of an IDE card.

Poking around the Internet, I found that Ubuntu worked fine on these machines. Specifically, the 64-bit desktop version was supposed to run. So, I downloaded it, booted it, and sure enough, it seemed to work fine.

I realized that I was NOT using the amd64 version of Gentoo. So, I grabbed the amd64 minimal disk, booted with pci=nommconf, and started the install, again. This time, I took the .config file from the Ubuntu CD, copied it to my /usr/src/linux directory, ran make oldconfig, ran make menuconfig, and things seem fine. As I needed to get the machines running yesterday (or 4 days ago), I have not really looked at the differences between my config and Ubuntu's. It may be that the amd64 version is part of the answer. And, Ubuntu does not require the pci=nommconf, so I'm not sure what they are doing differently. If I have time to experiment, I'll make another post.

This will not be a desktop machine. It's actually going to be used for some "experiments" with OpenVPN, HA Linux, DRBD, etc., so I do not really care if the video, sound, etc. work. I do know that performance is very good compared to my initial problems.