Re: [gentoo-user] Something weird and I'm confused. BIOS and SATA is empty

[Mick]

On Sunday 06 Nov 2011 12:43:06 Dale wrote:
> Hi,
>
> This is weird and I'm not sure what info to give yet.  This is the
> events tho. First, a raccoon got on the power substation transformer
> that supplies power for the whole county, excluding my local city which
> has its own transformer.  So, we lost power.  It was sudden just like a
> power switch.  Yea, this happens regular here and it ticks me to no
> end.  It also ticks off the power company because it is always about 2
> or 3 in the morning when the little farts do this.  Second, my system
> switched to the UPS battery which was beeping and woke me up.  I did a
> normal shutdown and cut everything off.  No problems so far.  Patience.
> o_O
>
> When the power came back on, I turned on the UPS which turns on the
> modem, router, monitor and everything computer related back on.  I
> waited a few seconds and turned on my rig.  BIOS comes up which I wasn't
> really looking at, then Grub prompt.  I hit enter and got the "file not
> found" thing.  Well, this is weird.  So, I hit a key to try a older
> kernel, I keep several older versions around just in case.  Same error.
> Hmmm.  I did a reset and noticed the BIOS is NOT seeing a single drive
> connected, NOT ONE.  What !!  I enter the BIOS and go to the drive
> section and try to get it to detect them, nothing.  Surely three hard
> drives and a DVD burner can't all go out at exactly the same time.
> Well, after scratching my head a bit, I reset the BIOS to defaults,
> which should be about what it is anyway since I don't overclock.  Still
> same grub error.
>
> After a bit, I loaded sysrescue from the USB stick.  I thought maybe
> grub updated and it was having issues so was planning to chroot in and
> fix it.  Here comes a funny part.  When I did a cat /proc/partitions
> from sysrescue, all my drives and partitions were there even tho the
> BIOS didn't see them.  However, cfdisk gave me a error when I tried to
> look at the drives.  Same error on ALL drives.  Now I'm freaking out a
> bit.  :/  Oh, for you folks who use LABELS like me, write down which
> partition is what.  If cfdisk doesn't work, you can't tell what
> partition is what.  ;-)  Anyway, while in there I finally started
> mounting partitions and seeing what files were there until I figured out
> what was what, at least for root and boot.  When I did my ls on /boot,
> the kernels were symlinks to the kernel sources on /usr which is not
> mounted yet.  OK.  Whew!!  That's why grub can't find the kernel since
> it is a symlink to a partition that is not mounted yet.  I did find two
> that were actual files and not links.  Thanks goodness for being a
> packrat.  lol
>
> I reboot and the BIOS shows my drives not as SATA but as IDE.  However,
> I edit the grub kernel line to point to a good kernel and it boots.  I'm
> actually typing in it now.
>
> My questions you ask?  Why is the BIOS not seeing the drives correctly?
> The main BIOS screen sees nothing and it used to print them on the
> screen, including the DVD burner.  They do show up on the second screen
> where AHCI detects drives.  Next question, why could cfdisk not see the
> drives?  Note, I tried all three drives on my system, same error.  I may
> reboot into the sysrescue thing and try it again and write down the error.
>
> I'm going to test on this some more.  I want to figure this out in case
> there is something wrong or I run into this again and can't get cfdisk
> to work.  I'm also going to print my partition layout too.  lol
>
> Oh, from the Gentoo install, cfdisk sees the drives and works
> perfectly.  The only thing I notice is a "*" way out to the right on the
> last partition.  Like this:
>
> sda9   Logical   ext4   [chroot]   61832.05   *
>
> I'm not sure what the "*" means tho.  Any ideas?  That is where I do my
> builds for a 32 bit install hence the label.  It is not even mounted all
> the time.
>
> Dale
>
> :-)  :-)
>
> P. S.  I'll post back as I test things.  This is weird.  Like me.  ROFL

Can you set in your BIOS which controller IDE or SATA manages the drives?

I'm not sure why you have a symlink to your /usr/src/linux files from /boot (I 
don't understand it).  In /boot you should have the image files themselves of 
your desired kernels (plus corresponding System and .config files).
-- 
Regards,
Mick