Please please help me installing Gentoo

victorsk · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Jul 2010 Posts: 97

Hi Everyone,

I have decided to install Gentoo while running Mandriva and Windows on the same box. New space for partitions got allocated for Gentoo and I am running Gentoo LiveDVD as I am writing this.

I followed the installation documentation exactly as it is on your website except I installed amd64 version of stage3 but problems started happening when trying to install gentoo-sources.

Now when I try to run 'emerge gentoo-sources' I get this output:

SinoTech

Jaglover · Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2010 11:19 pm Post subject:

d2_racing · Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2010 2:41 am Post subject:

Did you flush your partition table

victorsk · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Jul 2010 Posts: 97

Hi folks,

Thank you so much for your replies.

jpp_ · Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2010 5:46 am Post subject:

Just follow the handbook.
satge & portage / chroot / little config / sources / menuconfig / grub / needed tools / reboot

you miss the chroot part, i think.
and if you already have a boot loader, install in some partition (chroot) and add that one to your actual bootloader.

John R. Graham · Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2010 11:24 am Post subject:

How does your hard drive show up under the LiveDVD? As "/dev/sda"? In any case, just so we can get on the same page, please boot the LiveDVD and then post the output of

cwr · Veteran Joined: 17 Dec 2005 Posts: 1969

I'm pretty sure that you don't need to re-install grub; in fact, it may confuse
things. Just add the new gentoo kernel to the current grub.conf file, if you
are using the first version of grub. (The second version is tricky, and badly
documented; I don't know how it works.)

Otherwise, the fine Gentoo manual is your friend. It really is very complete
and clear.

Will

victorsk · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Jul 2010 Posts: 97

cwr · Veteran Joined: 17 Dec 2005 Posts: 1969

I get a bad vibe off /dev/sda16 - the default (SCSI based) drivers can handle a maximum
of 16 partitions,, 0-15, and to get more you need devicemapper and LVM. Not the best
way to start installing Gentoo for the first time, but Mandriva may have already put the
infrastructure in place. Probably best to check carefully and post here when you are
back at your machine.

Good luck - Will

Jaglover · Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:20 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2010 8:31 pm Post subject:

Jaglover,

Thats harmless
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2010 8:36 pm Post subject:

cwr,

The old IDE kernel drivers support up to 63 partitions. That breaks horribly when you attempy to move to libata because partitions 16..63 are no longer accessable.

Maybe the way ahead is to use the old IDE drivers but there is more, logical partitions are always numbered from 5 upwards. When you delete one, all the ones above the deleted logical partition move down.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

cwr · Veteran Joined: 17 Dec 2005 Posts: 1969

I thought all the old PATA partitions were labelled hdX, not sdX?

Will

victorsk · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Jul 2010 Posts: 97

Hi folks,

Thanks again for responses. Here is the actual list of my parition information when fdisk -l /dev/sda is executed:

jpp_ · Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2010 4:43 pm Post subject:

So, you chose compress the kernel with lzma compression, but you don't have lzma there, emerge it

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2010 5:08 pm Post subject:

cwr,

Correct - the old IDE drivers give you /dev/hda names but if you partition a drive with the old IDE driver in use, you can use up to 63 partitions.
When you swap to the libata drivers, the kernel will only create device nodes for the first 15 ... /dev/sda1..15.

Partitions 16 and up cannot be accessed by their /dev nodes as there won't be any.

fdisk doesn't care - it just reads and writes the partition table. I suspect you can create more than 15 partitions on /dev/sda with fdisk but I haven't tested. The point is, its quite easy to have partitions that cannot be accessed.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

victorsk · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Jul 2010 Posts: 97

Hi,

Yes, I have installed lzma-util after googling for solution. Went as far as configuring GRUB but as some have pointed out partition sda16 can cause porblems. I was unable to install the bootloader. My only hope now is to recover Mandriva so that it can (hopefully) automatically set up GRUB. Do you think it's possible for Madriva to detect Gentoo installation?

Thanks,
Victor.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2010 6:39 pm Post subject:

victorsk,

emerging lzma-utils will not help with a kernel problem. Consider the boot sequence.

The BIOS does POST and sets up the hardware
It looks around for any add in cards with their own BIOS, and runs the initialisation code
Lastly, it loads the MBR and jumps to its load address.

The MBR code uses BIOS calls to load the Grub stage1.5 from the sectors following the MBR
It exits by jumping to the stage1.5 entry point.

Grub stage1.5 reads the stage2 file from /boot and passes control to it.
The stage2 reads grub.conf and eventually loads the compressed kernel file and maybe an initrd file.
When its done, it jumps to the (compressed) kernel start address.

At this point grub hs completed its task, the (compressed) kernel is in RAM and perhaps an initrd file.
There is nothing else and the kernel has no way to read the hard drive until root is mounted.

Boot continues with the kernel decompressing itself. So you need to choose lzma in the kernel.
It does some initialisation then mounts root. That can be either your real root or the initrd.
With a root filesystem mounted, the kernel runs the init script. That controls what happens next.

Your partitions

John R. Graham · Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2010 6:39 pm Post subject:

victorsk,

You need to reduce the number of partitions. One thing you can do easily is to use the same swap partition for all of your installed distros as the contents of swap doen't need to be preserved from boot to boot. Delete one swap partition and that will get you down to the 16 partition limit and should allow you to proceed with the Gentoo installation.

(It's also pretty easy to share the boot partition; you usually don't even need to rename the kernels as they will generally be different. But just combining swap partitions is enough for now.)

- John
_________________
I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2010 6:46 pm Post subject:

John R. Graham,

The limit is 15 partitions. Each SCSI major device has 16 minor device numbers, one of which is the whole drive, so its /dev/sda, /dev/sda1..15, then it breaks.

John R. Graham · Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2010 7:22 pm Post subject:

Neddy,

Okay, understood. The "best practice" corrective action is still the same, though, isn't it? Namely, to reduce the number of partitions to 15 or less. He just needs to eliminate one more. Right?

- John
_________________
I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2010 8:42 pm Post subject:

John R. Graham,

Yep, there in no future in going back to the old IDE kernel branch - it will be removed one day. Its already depreciated.

Deleting both swaps would be a get you going measure but it would break other distros /etc/fstab as all the partitions above the swaps will get renumbered. It will also leave unpartitioned space in places that may not be useful.

Some major partition surgery is needed anyway.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.