Migrating from singlex86 to dual AMD (system now wont boot )

[Unclethommy]

Hi there I have got my hands on an "old" dual CPU athlon MP system. I want to simply take out my old motherboard and attach all the necesary devices to the new motherboard. I have a read a few articles at the forum saying that all i need to change would be encorporating SMP into the kernel? I have tried to google for a wiki but have not found anything. I am going to hunt round for an option when I get home today, but I was wondering if anything else other than the obvious cflags and kernel modules need to be changed to get my computer to worth with its new "brains" ?

is there any thing else i should try to make full use of the new dual cpu system?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[neysx]

Replace your motherboard and boot your Gentoo, then edit your kernel config:

[Unclethommy]

Wow, great, I'll let you know how I get on neysx Thanks for the prompt reply

If any one else has any hints to maximise the dual cpu please let me know.

Thanks again

[marcossoft]

[barrison]

Like it was said before, make sure you have SMP in your new kernel to gain access to your multiple processors. Adding the -j3 into /etc/make.conf will allow you to to use them when building through portage. Finally make sure the architecture is correct in /etc/make.conf. Then emerge world

[Unclethommy]

Super, I will post back on how it goes (it may take a week to set everything up as I am busy at the moment), i'll try and do a timed emerge too to show the difference My system is already fairly fast as it compiles in RAM (i have 1.5GB)

The new system will have 3GB RAM and dual 2Gb MP's (drewls) lol we'll see the results later..... ( i am wishing now that i had made different partitions for my root directory rather than just one large one would have loved to try out the howto on the forums page which tells you how to load programs straight into ram! apparently you cant do this if the folders are all on same partition )

Thanks again. "i'll be back"

[neysx]

Make sure you do not test one of the many ebuilds that forces -j1, often needlessly

[Unclethommy]

Do you have a recommendation? eg perhaps mozilla-firefox or vmware? I dont want to wait too long for it to finish.

[Unclethommy]

Okay, I changed the kernel settings as suggested, I have a big problem The system doesnt boot past the kernel. I get a kernel panic

It gives me an error saying VFS: Cannot open root device hda3 or unkown block (0,0)

Unable to mount root fs on unkown block

I know the system works correctly as I am able to boot from the knoppix cd and that is how I am currently writing this post.

Does anyone have any advice? Do I need to add support for something else?

The motherboard seems to be an asus a7m 266 D with two althon 2ghx MP's.

Do I need to enable any other options?

[suicidal_orange_II]

O dear, everyone overlooked one thing - hard drive drivers.

Boot from a livecd, recompile the kernel with your new IDE and/or SCSI drivers, and all will be well. You'd may as well update your AGP and enable SMP at the same time, no point in another reboot


Suicidal_Orange

[Unclethommy]

Yup, i fugured the same when I had a look at lspci and saw a new chipset called AMD 760/768.

Have tried to recompile them straight into the kernel and removed the old chipset dependence.

How do i update my AGP???

[suicidal_orange_II]

In character devices in kernel config. You might not need to, only if your chipset has changed manufacturer and your using open source or nvidia graphics drivers but its probably a good idea to check.


Suicidal_Orange

[Unclethommy]

I have managed to get the kernel to load properly but when the init starts, it has losts off problems:

Mainly as far as i can see it cant write to my disks.... it simply says "can not create file or directory"

and also there is an error saying that the time stamps on some files is in the future :S , i think this occured as the new mobo's time was set to 2000 and i didnt notice this whilst making the original kernel, it complained about time being skewed, i have consequently changed the clock to the correct time, but i fear there may be problems with a few files, is there a way to solve this time problem as well as the problem not being able to write to the disks???

thought it would be less problomatic than this , at least i'm learning new things

[drizzt]

sounds like your disc is mounted readonly....
_________________
People don't have to earn my respect. I offer my respect to them, but be careful to lose my respect...

[Unclethommy]

I am using the same fstab configuration as below .... it used to work before.... could this be cos of my new AMD chipset which is controlling the IDE?

[drizzt]

can you post result of

[Unclethommy]

Unfortunately it wont let me loggin normally and complains pam_tally [3198] error opening /var/log/faillog for update

i get the same when trying to login as my normal user.

when i do login, there is no output from mount.

most other commands seem to work like 'ls' etc...

in knoppix , i have:

[Unclethommy]

Just some additional information :

I am getting illegal instructions all the time and now getting errors saying 'broken pipe'

also, still getting the read-only filesystem errors during init starting....

I was just about able to read the first piece of output before the screen scrolls too quickly, it says something about 'skipping mtab initialization (ro root)?'

is there a way to scroll back up the error output once i am presented with the login prompt? pressing the up arrow just prints random characters in the current command. The interactive booting doesnt work and obviously as the partition is read-only, theres no way to write log data to the hardrive for me to read

i am going to try to compile the kernel without the -os option and use the -02 option recommended as the safe flag for my cpus if anyone can help me i would be greatly appreciated.

the system works fine in knoppix livecd which suggests this is some kind of kernel problem and not my hardware as i can mount my partitions from the livecd etc....

[widan]

[Unclethommy]

Ah, great, i will try "cat /proc/mounts" as soon as I can

as for the illegal instructions.... <blushes> well it was compiled for an amd system using -02 -pipe and the -noframe and march=athlon-xp

but i recently got an intel chip and hence changed the cflags to march=pentium-4 but i onlt recompiled a few using these flags for the usual emerge updates and everything seemed hunky dory. But i did not emerge the whole system again as i was lazy.

but then when i switched to the dual athlon-mp's i changed the cflags to march=athlon-mp but didnt remerge anything as i wasnt instructed to as you see earlier in the posts (but maybe it was a newbie mistake as that was implied).

the problem now is that even booting using knoppix, it wont let me emerge after chrooting to my old disk as it says illegal instruction any ideas?

EDIT: unfortunately , i cant seem to boot into the hardrive with my /root directory to get the cat /proc/mounts output... its gives me a grub error 17 its getting worse argh!!! lol, i had to install windows on another hardrive just so i can get a usable system! highly embarassing lol.