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

[Dale]

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