Re: [gentoo-dev] Directions please

[Grant Goodyear]

I'm forwarding this message to the mailing list since the devs need to
know about bootdisk failures.

> In answer to your other questions my SCSI controller is an adaptec 2940.
> The driver for os/2 and stuff is something like aic7870.add ... It's
> pretty common and I thought the gentoo disk had support for the 2940
> but I don't know for sure.
>
> Also the 2940 is running version 1.23 of the bios (latest one
> available)... in theory it is suppose to support bootable CD's
> but it doesn't seem to work with this oh and btw I used the
> livecd-ut2003-x86-1.4_rc1.iso version.
>
> The CD works fine when I use it on a machine with an IDE CD ... it's
> just that SCSI CD on my home machine that is the problem.  And it is
> strange that when the system is booting up it notices that it has a
> bootable CD and reports it during the adaptec device check.  But no
> clue why it decides to ignore it and just jumps to the hard drive with
> my operating system.  For an experiment to see if I could force it to
> boot from the SCSI cd I disconnected the harddrive so it wouldn't have
> another device to boot from ... but that failed as it refused to boot
> from anything.

Can you boot other cd's using this drive?  The earlier livecd had a
problem where the kernel was missing the driver for my scsi card, but in
that case the system did start booting the kernel, it just failed when
the kernel needed to mount /.  Failing to boot off of the cd at all
suggests that either the bios isn't set properly, or your burned cd
might be corrupt.

> I'm kind of at a loss about where to go from this point.  I'm tempted
> to create a new partition on my harddisk and just dump the contents
> of the CD on to that partition  and see if I can boot it but I kind
> of doubt that would work.

No, that wouldn't be the best idea.  Can you boot from Tomsrtbt?  If so,
then after booting into tomsrtbt you can set up the filesystem (creating
and turning on swap space as one of your first steps), mount the cd,
extract the stage1 tarball onto a ready partition, use ifconfig or dhcp
to set up networking, chroot, and you'll be off and running.

> I did manage to find the forums and even found a thread about using a boot disk
> from toms.  Unfortunately that just lead to another problem in that the
> initrd.img file is too large to work with on a floppy and if I put it on the
> harddrive I can't get to it without booting into windows 2000 but the
> loadlin.exe apparently refuses to work in a dos window.  So I'm again stuck...
> can't build a bootdisk from the image.

Toms has the appropriate scsi support already compiled in (most likely),
so you don't need an initrd.  In fact, you don't want to build a
bootdisk from the image; you just need enough to get you going.

Hope that helps,
g2boojum