Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Something weird and I'm confused. BIOS and SATA is empty
Date: Sun, 06 Nov 2011 13:41:20
Message-Id: 4EB68E3A.2070109@gmail.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-user] Something weird and I'm confused. BIOS and SATA is empty by Dale
1 Dale wrote:
2 > Hi,
3 >
4 > This is weird and I'm not sure what info to give yet. This is the
5 > events tho. First, a raccoon got on the power substation transformer
6 > that supplies power for the whole county, excluding my local city
7 > which has its own transformer. So, we lost power. It was sudden just
8 > like a power switch. Yea, this happens regular here and it ticks me
9 > to no end. It also ticks off the power company because it is always
10 > about 2 or 3 in the morning when the little farts do this. Second, my
11 > system switched to the UPS battery which was beeping and woke me up.
12 > I did a normal shutdown and cut everything off. No problems so far.
13 > Patience. o_O
14 >
15 > When the power came back on, I turned on the UPS which turns on the
16 > modem, router, monitor and everything computer related back on. I
17 > waited a few seconds and turned on my rig. BIOS comes up which I
18 > wasn't really looking at, then Grub prompt. I hit enter and got the
19 > "file not found" thing. Well, this is weird. So, I hit a key to try
20 > a older kernel, I keep several older versions around just in case.
21 > Same error. Hmmm. I did a reset and noticed the BIOS is NOT seeing a
22 > single drive connected, NOT ONE. What !! I enter the BIOS and go to
23 > the drive section and try to get it to detect them, nothing. Surely
24 > three hard drives and a DVD burner can't all go out at exactly the
25 > same time. Well, after scratching my head a bit, I reset the BIOS to
26 > defaults, which should be about what it is anyway since I don't
27 > overclock. Still same grub error.
28 >
29 > After a bit, I loaded sysrescue from the USB stick. I thought maybe
30 > grub updated and it was having issues so was planning to chroot in and
31 > fix it. Here comes a funny part. When I did a cat /proc/partitions
32 > from sysrescue, all my drives and partitions were there even tho the
33 > BIOS didn't see them. However, cfdisk gave me a error when I tried to
34 > look at the drives. Same error on ALL drives. Now I'm freaking out a
35 > bit. :/ Oh, for you folks who use LABELS like me, write down which
36 > partition is what. If cfdisk doesn't work, you can't tell what
37 > partition is what. ;-) Anyway, while in there I finally started
38 > mounting partitions and seeing what files were there until I figured
39 > out what was what, at least for root and boot. When I did my ls on
40 > /boot, the kernels were symlinks to the kernel sources on /usr which
41 > is not mounted yet. OK. Whew!! That's why grub can't find the
42 > kernel since it is a symlink to a partition that is not mounted yet.
43 > I did find two that were actual files and not links. Thanks goodness
44 > for being a packrat. lol
45 >
46 > I reboot and the BIOS shows my drives not as SATA but as IDE.
47 > However, I edit the grub kernel line to point to a good kernel and it
48 > boots. I'm actually typing in it now.
49 >
50 > My questions you ask? Why is the BIOS not seeing the drives
51 > correctly? The main BIOS screen sees nothing and it used to print
52 > them on the screen, including the DVD burner. They do show up on the
53 > second screen where AHCI detects drives. Next question, why could
54 > cfdisk not see the drives? Note, I tried all three drives on my
55 > system, same error. I may reboot into the sysrescue thing and try it
56 > again and write down the error.
57 >
58 > I'm going to test on this some more. I want to figure this out in
59 > case there is something wrong or I run into this again and can't get
60 > cfdisk to work. I'm also going to print my partition layout too. lol
61 >
62 > Oh, from the Gentoo install, cfdisk sees the drives and works
63 > perfectly. The only thing I notice is a "*" way out to the right on
64 > the last partition. Like this:
65 >
66 > sda9 Logical ext4 [chroot] 61832.05 *
67 >
68 > I'm not sure what the "*" means tho. Any ideas? That is where I do
69 > my builds for a 32 bit install hence the label. It is not even
70 > mounted all the time.
71 >
72 > Dale
73 >
74 > :-) :-)
75 >
76 > P. S. I'll post back as I test things. This is weird. Like me. ROFL
77 >
78
79 I booted the sysrescue stick and ran cfdisk again. This is the error:
80
81 FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 3: Partition ends in the final
82 partial cylinder
83 Press any key yada yada.
84
85 I ran parted -l, it sees everything fine. Could it be that cfdisk on
86 sysrescue is broken? If parted didn't see it either then I would think
87 something else but . . . .
88
89 Going to google now. Then read up on the manual for my mobo. o_O Oh,
90 going to figure out this symlink kernel issues too.
91
92 Dale
93
94 :-) :-)