Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo system suddenly failed to boot.

[Jude DaShiell]

Check the date and time when you boot and if it isn't correct, you 
probably have a dead battery on your motherboard.  I had to replace one a 
couple days ago.  Fortunately the kind of battery my computer uses is sold 
in pharmacies since blood sugar meters also use them.

  On Mon, 15 Feb 2021, gevisz wrote:

> Yesterday, my relatively new install of Gentoo failed to boot with the
> following repeated messages:
>
> ata5.04: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 0)
> ata5.04: hard resetting link
> ata5.04: failed to resume link (SStatus 0 Scontrol 0)
>
> My first thought was that something is wrong with my old IDE (ATA)
> drive. (The Gentoo system partition was on /dev/sda5.)
>
> Nevertheless, I was able to boot from a flash drive with a live Gentoo
> CD and chroot into the Gentoo system partition of my IDE drive.
>
> So, I formatted a new SATA drive according to instructions given in
> Gentoo AMD64 Handbook, rsynced the corresponding IDE system partition
> into it by the following command:
>
> rsync -qaHAXS source_dir target_dir
>
> made the necessary changes to the corresponding fstab file, chrooted
> into the new system SATA partition, recompiled grub and installed it
> on the new disk.
>
> After all that I was able to boot the Gentoo system from the new
> partition. However, the booting process went as slow as hell, and at
> the end Xorg server failed to start.
>
> My next guess was that something went wrong with the last kernel I
> used to boot. So, I tried to boot using the previous kernel.
>
> However, this time the booting failed with almost the same messages as above:
>
> ata5.03: failed to resume link (SStatus 0 SControl 0)
> ata5.03: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 0)
> ata5.03: hard resetting link
> ata6.04: failed to resume link (SStatus 0 SControl 0)
>
> (Now, my new Gentoo system partition is on /dev/sdb2.)
>
> Shall I try to do something to fix it before reinstalling Gentoo anew?
>
> For example, I thought of booting with a live Gentoo flash drive,
> chrooting into the new system partition and recompiling @system.
> However, if it is not some package that is corrupted, it may be a waste of time.
> Or, maybe, @system may be narrowed to just a few packages needed at boot time?
> Shall I try to recreate initramfs, what in my case means re-emerging
> gentoo-kernel package?
> What do you think?
>
> P.S. Nevertheless, I still can successfully boot my very old legacy
> system from another partition of my IDE drive.
>
>