Gentoo fails to mount hard drive during installation

midori · n00b Joined: 18 Mar 2011 Posts: 3

Hi,
Since I'am a big gentoo fan and user, I thought it might be a good idea to install Gentoo on my SPARC Ultra10.
I grabbed the minimal iso, burned it to a disc and booted the installer with a old fashioned "boot cdrom" in the opb.
However, when the installer boots and tries to mount the Hard Drive it stops and, well, does nothing.
It reads:
attempting to mount /dev/hdb (which is certainly my hard drive, given a message above which says that /dev/hdb is indeed the hard drive).
I rebooted the installer with every possible boot parameter (nodetect, noidedma etc.), with no success.
The installer just refuses to mount the hard drive.

Some words about the hardware:
I use a normal cd drive, which is definetly not damaged, since it can boot any other install cd, like the openbsd installer. The hardware setup as such is absolutely generic; I neither added RAM nor did i modify anything else.

However, there is one exception.
The Hard Drive is not a normal hard drive, but instead a CF card, plugged in via ia ide2cf converter. The cf card works great with openbsd, freebsd, netbsd and even the annoying debian installer. The cf card also works with my amiga1200 ( same applies to the adapter/converter).

To put it in a nutshell: The gentoo installer refuses to boot, due to mount problems with the hard drive. I changed the configuration and the hardware etc. Yet, one must take in consideration, that the hd is not a normal hd, but a cf card.
So thats the Problem.
I could use a normal hd maybe, and simply copy gentoo with dd onto the cf card. However I would prefer a clean solution.

So thats pretty much it.
I hope one might help me here.
Regards
midori

The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

Use a different install medium. You can use any linux distro live CD (or DVD) that includes the packages for chroot and, of course, support for your drive.
_________________
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

midori · n00b Joined: 18 Mar 2011 Posts: 3

ah, jeeze, how could I have overlooked that? The biggest advantage of gentoo (maybe), its scalability.

However, I dont know which Livecd I should use. According to distrowatch, only the three major BSDs, Debian and MilaX are available for the sparc64 architecure. Before building my own livecd, would you suggest one of the three?

I think OpenBSD would do the trick, yet I dont know if chroot is shipped with OpenBSD.
Quodlibet, I will simply give it a try.
Again, thanks for pointing me at that.

Regards
midori

The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

I googled Debian and BSD, and it looks like they include chroot.
It looks like MilaX does not.

I really don't use any of them, so I could not say for sure.
_________________
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

midori · n00b Joined: 18 Mar 2011 Posts: 3

In Fact MilaX does. Yet it does neither comtain wget or a other browser, which makes it somewhat hard to download the stage 3 tarball or the portage.
However, I could simply store that on the cf card or copy milax into ram and use another disk, which would store the two tarballs.

Anyway, thats not important. I ll give it a try; thanks for pointing me at the already given solution of simply using an other livecd.

One can close this thread, The Problem is, well, solved.