Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo Installation, Kernel Panic

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thu, 19 Jul 2012 22:09:31 +0300
Andrejs Igumenovs <andrejs.igumenovs@×××××.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> After going over the installation instructions and performing the
> standard operations (genkernel etc.), the Kernel halts during the
> boot. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-amd64.xml?part=1
>
> I'm attaching the screenshot of what happens…
>
> I'm not the Linux expert, so don't know how to fix.

The main error is "cannot open root device sda3"

sda3 is the 3rd partition of the first hard disk (on a Windows machine
it would probably be E:\)

Two things will cause that error:

The first disk doesn't have a third partition on it. Please describe
how your disks are laid out and where you unpacked the gentoo tarball
too. You can get this info by booting off a Live CD just like the first
part of the install and running "fdisk -l" as root in a terminal. Paste
the entire output in a mail reply and we'll take a look for you.

The second cause is your kernel doesn't have drivers for your
motherboard's chipset. These cannot be kernel modules, they must be
compiled in (unless you are building an initrd - but that's complicated
so I don't think you'll be going that route on the first try). Just
like the in first cause you can get good info from running

lspci
plus the entire content of one file - the kernel config. It's hard to
describe where it will be, but if you follow along in the install
guide, you boot off a LiveCD, chroot into the gentoo install
at /mnt/gentoo, then inside there you will find a
directory /usr/src/linux - you went there the first time to configure
the kernel. In that directory is a file called ".config". We need that
entire file to see if you configured the kernel with the minimum
requirements.

Also mention what filesystem you chose for the root partition: ext3,
ext4, reiser or maybe something else (but it's probably ext4)

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com