Decided to take the plunge today and redo my box so I downloaded the gentoo-basic-x86-1.4_rc2.iso 01-Jan-2003 01:50 38.9M ISO from http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo/releases/1.4_rc2/x86/x86/livecd/ and proceeded to fire up the CD. First try it hung trying to access an IDE hard drive on a HPT372 controller, fine most kernels do. Disabled the controller in the BIOS and we're off got all the way to 'Scanning for aic7xxx', once again the installer hung. Rebooted and gave the boot: gentoo noscsi, and once again we're off gets all the way thru lets me select language change root passwd etc, great. When I try modprobe/insmod aic7xxx, I get alot of errors which mean very little to me I tried mounting /home and getting the error to pipe to a file named error but it didnt work. This is the command I gave: modprobe aic7xxx > /mnt/home/error> file 2>&1. Not sure if that is in fact the proper command to give. My controller is a Adaptec 2940U2W I have not tried flashing the BIOS in a long time. I build my kernel using 'old aic7xxx' module. Let me know if I can help sort this out in anyway. Thanks for the great distro. Sincerely, Cam Mead
Actually, modprobe aic7xxx > /mnt/home/error> file 2>&1 in my first post should have been modprobe aic7xxx > /mnt/home/error 2>&1 Sorry for the confusion. CM
To update my posts of yesterday. I grabbed the new iso at: http://www.ibiblio.org/gentoo/experimental/x86/livecd/livecd-basic-x86-2003011300.iso and began installing. I still needed to pass nosci to the boot prompt or it would hang detecting 'aic7xxx' as before, but once that was done everything booted to the language prompt just fine. 'modprobe aic7xxx' worked this time, but modprobe sd_mod returned error reporting that it could not find the module. However the disks could be mounted so all is good there. I dont have SCSI cdroms in the box anymore so I can not confirm that sr_mod will behave the same way. The one problem I did have this time was my network card was detected at startup in dmesg but the module '8139too' was not loaded by default. I had to do this myself, which loaded it fine. The box is in the middle of bootstrap'ing now I'll report any other errors as I see them. CM
how about the latest livecd ?
Tried the 1.4_rc4 basic LiveCD. The system specs have changed still using the same controller and disks, however the box is now a dual P3 800. The results from passing these arguments: Worked: smp dosci Didnt work: smp gentoo doscsi gentoo Passing 'smp doscsi', booted the cd into RAM, the others did not and I could dhcpcd eth0 to get my nic setup. There are no longer any drives on the RAID controllers so I can't test that issue. I can provide more info if you want.
the old_aic7xxx was removed because it hung other boxes im glad second kernel worked, I want it there for more of a backup then actual smp support. Ive updated aic7xxx drivers to latest available in xfs-sources-r3 (livecd main kernel) well have to see if this goes away.
reopen if needed
