Re: [gentoo-user] The Root Block Device is unspecified or not detected - PCMCIA card CD Boot on Sony Vaio

[Richard Watson]

On Sun, 2005-10-30 at 02:36 +0000, Stroller wrote:
> On Oct 29, 2005, at 10:52 pm, A. Khattri wrote:
> > On Sun, 30 Oct 2005, Richard Watson wrote:
> >
> >> Hi - I have an old Sony Vaio I thought to run Gentoo on with X. The CD
> >> drive is attached to a PCMCIA card. When the LiveCD boots it seems to
> >> go
> >> OK up until mounting root at which point I get the error "The Root
> >> Block
> >> Device is unspecified or not detected " and then I'm offerred to
> >> either
> >> shell or specify a /dev. I've tried gentoo-nofb dopcmcia ide=nodma but
> >> no luck. I'm a bit stuck at this point does anyone have any
> >> suggestions
> >> how I could make the install CD boot? Thanks, Richard
> >
> > What sort of PCMCIA card? SCSI?
>
> I have this idea it's not SCSI.
>
> Sony sold this CD-ROM-on-a-string for their sub-notebook Viaos of the
> PII - PIII era. I think the PMCIA card & optical driver were both
> hardwired to the cable and it was certainly never implied that the
> PCMCIA card might be used with any other kind of drive. Google finds a
> photo at http://www.allnotebooks.ru/img/compl/51.gif
>
> I installed Gentoo on a Pentium II 400 Vaio "Picturebook", the Sony
> with a 6" widescreen (1024 x 480??) but never had one of these CD-Roms
> available, only the floppy drive. In fact I cheated & resorted to
> removing the hard-drive & installing Gentoo on it using a desktop PC
> before returning the drive to the laptop. I think it might be possible
> to avoid this by installing from stage 3 - that mostly just needs to be
> unpacked onto a Linux-formatted partition, doesn't it? There are surely
> Linux distros that'll boot on this device so a pre-compiled kernel
> could be copied across from another machine and then only grub needs to
> be run, I think.
>
> Richard: does Knoppix boot from this CD-Rom drive? An Ubuntu LiveCD?
> Perhaps it might be worth trying an older (2003, 2004) Gentoo install
> CD. A Google for "parallel port cd-rom linux" returns, amongst others,
> this page http://cyberelk.net/tim/parport/paride.html so I reckon your
> drive is probably supported by the kernel.
>
> Stroller.
>
Hey Stroller ... You got the model in 1 ...! I think you're correct. I'm going to try and 
use partition magic under Windows 2000 which is the OS it came with to create my partitions and install
a stage 3. I'll let you know how I go. Hopefully having an EXT2
partition will help Knoppix start properly. Thanks, Richard

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