LiveCD won't start "no valid root device found"

Devrethman

I recently bought a new computer with an intel Q6600 and an MSI P35 MB, and I tried the liveCD (amd64 2007.0) and it boots, but it complains about no valid boot device partway through the loading of the kernel, and to specify one. I've tried specifying "/dev/hd(a-d) and /dev/sd(a-d)" to no avail. If I type shell (which brings me to a busybox) and ls /dev, there's NO disks or block devices of any sort (no sd* or hd*).
I think it has something to do with the fact that I have a P35 chipset (which afaik is newer than 2007.0, not sure though)and that everything in my system is SATA (hard disks and CD rom). I'm not sure though, and if that is the problem, how would I fix it?
Thanks in advance for any help.

edit: I also tried booting it with "doscsi" thinking that might help cause SATA goes through the scsi subsystem (I think). It didn't change anything.
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vaxbrat · l33t Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 731 Location: DC Burbs

I had a similar problem with an HP Opteron based workstation. There was some foolishness with the kernel and the acpi that caused the system to not see the scsi controller for the disk. I had to pass pci=noacpi in the kernel args before the disk could be seen. This was true for both Fedora Core and Gentoo.

I also have an HP laptop where the yenta cardbus isn't seen until I do some weird things. There, I think there is some bizarro bridge to bridge stuff going on between the southbridge and the cardbus.

Try the pci=noacpi thing first. You might also want to play the kernel sources for a recent kernel out to somewhere and look at /usr/src/linux/Documentation/parameters.txt to see what sort of other mischief you can perform on the kernel args.

didymos · Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 6:20 am Post subject:

I've never used the LiveCD myself, but can you modprobe additional sata drivers? Or is everything already loaded and/or built into the kernel?
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Thomas S. Howard

Devrethman · Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 6:10 pm Post subject: Re: maybe your sata is "masked"

Devrethman · Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 6:13 pm Post subject:

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 10:54 pm Post subject:

give my latest (x86!) livecd a try, it has a 2.6.21-kernel - unfortunately I can't update my amd64-livecd since my hardware isn't fully supported under hardened amd64 (nvidia-drivers :evil:

) so there's only x86) :

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-563186.html

marvell-chipset support is highly experimental !
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Devrethman · Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 1:04 am Post subject:

didymos · Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 3:25 am Post subject:

The P35 is an Intel chipset. The Marvell 88SE6111 is another IDE/SATA controller, in addition to that provided by the ICH9. Most of the SATA connections are handled by the ICH9. The Marvell appears to be there mainly to provide IDE support.
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Devrethman · Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 6:48 am Post subject:

My MB has 5 SATA ports, supposedly one of them's through the Marvell chip and the other 4 are through the ICH9 (according to its specs on newegg). One of them is kind of off to the side on the physical motherboard (the other 4 are together), so I'm assuming that's the marvell one. However, the marvell one has nothing plugged into it, and I have no plain IDE devices (I have an SATA DVD burner, and 3 SATA hard disks), so lack of support for it shouldn't cause the liveCD to not find itself (or any of my HD's for that matter), as it's not used. If there's lack of ICH9 support, that could be a bit different...
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didymos · Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 7:35 am Post subject:

I'm not sure which kernel revision the LiveCD runs, specifically. I know it's a 2.6.19 kernel, which supports up ICH8 chipsets, I believe.

[edit] Just checked the source. It should work. The "AHCI SATA support" driver is supposed to work with ICH9 chipsets. It's "Intel PIIX/ICH SATA support" that maxes out at ICH8.
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Thomas S. Howard

Devrethman · Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2007 3:42 am Post subject:

neuron · Advocate Joined: 28 May 2002 Posts: 2371

I had this problem, I slapped in an old hd, installed windows on it (with the drivers that came with the motherboard), installed vmware on windows, gave vmware access to the partition (a bit scary, but it worked). Set everything up like that and rebooted and it worked

.

A lot of work though, glad the hd I found worked, it's a bit broken

Devrethman · Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2007 7:13 pm Post subject:

well, I've got windows on this at the moment, but I don't have VMware, do they have a trial I can download? Cause I'm kind of broke at the moment.
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kernelOfTruth · Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2007 7:47 pm Post subject:

Devrethman · Posted: Thu Jun 28, 2007 2:02 am Post subject:

Devrethman · Posted: Sat Jul 14, 2007 11:44 pm Post subject:

Sorry to bump an ancient thread, but I can't for the life of me get it working through VMware, and I'm quickly getting bored of windoze vista...

Has anything happened in the last few weeks that'll allow me to get linux working agian?

If not, any reccomendations for a P35-based board that'll actually work?
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hattable · n00b Joined: 05 Jun 2007 Posts: 11 Location: NEC

I too have become stuck at such an issue.
New computer...blah blah blah
no root device found, no disks seen
Mine gets better

As soon as it loads up to that point from the cdrom it loses the ability to see that the cdrom is there!
Gentoo is not alone, everything from Paragon Parition Manager to Back|Track can't get past that except for Small Gentoo X
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-563186-highlight-jmicron+livecd.html

But for some reason in small gentoo x the root password (at least for me) isn't actually set to 'root' like it claims so I am stuck with user access to a computer that I cannot boot into. This is real fun.

XP installed easily. So i'm thinking of trying to install Gentoo from XP.

I know that it is not the cdrom drive itself because this is the same drive from my old computer, not just the same model... the exact drive.
And I also experience this issue when booting from a liveUSB gentoo disk. So somewhere there is a much larger underlying problem for maybe many people that no amount of options being passed to the kernel at boot can fix. I'll let you know how this goes should that be what you must do.

And if anyone has ANY suggestions please send them my way.
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hattable · n00b Joined: 05 Jun 2007 Posts: 11 Location: NEC

Holy Hell! :!:

I was determined to get the Small Gentoo X to work so after a lot of guessing.
root password is actually 'user' And you guessed it user 'user' 's password is 'root'

Time Paradox.
Anyway, it still looks like this is going to be the install disk for me. This should probably be more well known as a solution to "No bootable medium found".
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kernelOfTruth · Posted: Sun Jul 15, 2007 9:11 am Post subject: Re: quick update

jakommo · Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2007 6:12 pm Post subject:

I got the MSI Neo2-FR P35 Mobo and have had the same problem. I used ubuntu 7.10 AMD64 LiveCD to bootup and partitoning. it was no prolem and my fake-raid-0 was detected and I could fdisk it.
rigth now I'm installing windows because it overwrites the mbr and I don't want to setup grub again.
after that I will "try" to install gentoo ;-)

for the peoples not used to ubuntu here is what I did.
bootup the live cd
#sudo passwd
#<enter password>
#su
#<enter password>
#vi /etc/apt/sources.list (uncomment the two lines starting with #deb*universe)
#apt-get update
#apt-get install dmraid
#dmraid -r
#ls -la /dev/mapper/

now you should see your raid and can fdisk it, etc.

cu

jakmmo