On 02:38 Mon 21 Mar     , Lindsay Haisley wrote:
> On Sun, 2011-03-20 at 21:13 -0500, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> > I also suspect What Jean-Marc said is the problem. I'd recommend 
> > completely disabling everything in the old ATA section to ensure it 
> > doesn't attempt to control any devices, while building the PATA 
> > driver into the kernel and using root=/dev/sdXN in the grub 
> > parameters.
> 
> If I use the stock configuration from the 2.6.36-gentoo-r5 kernel, 
> won't this have the correct basic kernel facilities built in, at least 
> as far as the deprecated IDE capabilities are concerned and the libata 
> replacement?  I assume the Gentoo devs modify kernels so that the 
> default config settings are more appropriate than those which come 
> with the vanilla kernel from the kernel devs, yes?

Things are pretty vanilla, as per Gentoo philosophy, unless you run 
genkernel to build your kernel. I wouldn't rely on anything being built 
in for a manually configured kernel.

Take a look at the kernel config guide if you want some pointers:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-amd64.xml?part=1&chap=7

> Putting "root=/dev/sda4" on the kernel cmd line in grub actually 
> worked, and got me a bit further in the boot process.  The kernel 
> obviously understood it.  However later in the boot process, I got 
> "Checking the root filesystem", following by an error message that the 
> root filesystem spec of /dev/sda4 wasn't understood.  This is a 
> complaint about the root fs spec is in /etc/fstab, since I had been 
> using a UUID spec there, and got an error at the same point in the 
> boot-up about the UUID instead.

That is symptomatic of a missing driver for an ATA controller or root 
filesystem.

> > It might be a worthwhile step to boot from a LiveCD and run `lspci 
> > -k` to identify the kernel modules.
> 
> lsmod will probably give the same useful information.

The useful thing about `lspci -k` is it only shows modules actually used 
by hardware on your system, rather than the huge superset of modules 
that are loaded.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Desktop project lead
Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.com