I have an Athlon XP1700+ system. I am trying to install Gentoo 1.4RC2 from the Athlon XP LiveCD but I cannot boot the operating system. It appears to be getting stuck while scanning the drives. I have tried booting with several different options as suggested (noapic, noscsi, apci=no) but with no effect. Each time, it finds my DVD and CD-R drives (hda and hdd) and then hangs. One thing to note is that my hard drives are not attached to the primary/secondary IDE chain but rather are located on additional Ultra100 ports (hde and hdg). I do notice that the kernel is finding the controller and it does see the drives. I mention this because I have been experiencing problems with LILO when trying to boot Debian 3.0 and RedHat 8.0 (Grub works fine in both cases). Otherwise, I have had not boot problems with either of those distributions of Linux.
I worked around the problem by booting off an RC1 CD I had made earlier. Once the system was booted, I inserted the RC2 CD into my CD-R drive, mounted it as /mnt/cdrom and followed the installation instructions.
Can you give more information about your computer , and ide controller brand
I encountered the same problem while rebuilding a vanilla kernel (2.4.20) under Debian. Eventually I applied Alan Cox's patches (patch-2.4.20-ac2) and this fixed it. Seems like the IDE drivers in the stock kernel are buggy. For reference, I have an Asus A7V266-E motherboard. The primary and secondary IDE are controlled by a VIA VT8233. I have a Pioneer DVD-ROM attached as primary/master and a Plextor CD-R attached as secondary/master. I have two disks attached to an on-board Promise PDC20265 IDE controller . Each disk is on its own chain set as master. They are not configured as a RAID. I have Windows XP on the first disk, Linux (whatever distribution I am playing with at the time) on the second. I use GRUB as a boot loader as I know from first hand experience that LILO does not support my configuration.
the kernels are slowly getting support for this chipset, xfs-sources-pre5 has been reported to now work with this chipset. and ive addeed patches to gs-sources-r2. but no confirmation yet. This problem should be gone totally when 2.4.21 is released.
db fix
