The Sony Vaio 505 series has an external pcmcia CD rom that is setup by the bios on powerup, and addressed as ide2=0x180,0x386 as boot paramters. In fact, dmesg shows the cdrom on /dev/hde, where it should be, but the boot loader cannot find the medium. Then I'm left with the message to specify boot device, but neither /dev/hde or /dev/hde1 work. This used to work just fine, but now neither the Gentoo LiveCD nor recent knoppix verisons work. Too bad, as these are excellent little laptops (~1kg!), and still have a lot of life in them. Reproducible: Always
If you drop to the shell at that point, can you mount the CD by hand?
> ------- Comment #1 from agaffney@gentoo.org 2007-02-18 05:56 0000 ------- > If you drop to the shell at that point, can you mount the CD by hand? > > Tried that: I made a mount point /mnt/hde1 and gave mount /dev/hde1 /mnt/hde1 but got "Invalid block device". Which seems strange because it was recognized by the kernel on boot. Also tried /dev/hde and hde2-7. I worked around the problem by installing from knoppix 4.0.2, which uses the old boot setup. Apparently, knoppix 5.1 and gentoo now do about the same thing on boot, because the result is the same. Another strange thing: When the boot procedure is trying to mount the CD, it only tries /dev/hda, 3 times! And gives something like: Trying /dev/hda ... device not found! Trying /dev/hda1 ... device not found! Trying /dev/hda2 ... device not found! ... I'm paraphrasing from memory here, the actual complaints may have been slightly different. It goes through /dev/hda through /dev/hda7 three times total before giving up. Hope this helps.
Results of some googling: This problem seems to be well known from many laptops that boot from external CD's: The CD is attached to a PCMCIA IDE interface (in my case recognized as a Ninja-ATA for what that's worth), and the BIOS is tweaked to recognize that and set it up as the boot device. As I said, knoppix < 5.0 dealt with this fine, and I haven't been able to boot with *anything* more recent, so it must be a general problem. It's solved for me, because I could boot from an old CD, but eventually gentoo is going to evolve beyond the ability to do an "old knoppix" install (new replacement for /proc? kernel 2.8?). One of the great advantages of gentoo is rescuing old but good hardware that would have to be chucked otherwise.
This sounds like a kernel issue. Perhaps you should take the issue upstream. Although, did (or can you) find any indication this issue has been fixed in newer kernels (2.6.19, perhaps)?
Can you also try booting with "dopcmcia" to see if by us loading the "ide-cs" modules prior to trying to detect the CD it works?
Can you try 2007.0?
> Can you also try booting with "dopcmcia" to see if by us > loading the "ide-cs" modules prior to trying to detect the CD it works? Tried this, nothing doing. As I said, the ide device is there, but the CD won't boot off it. > Can you try 2007.0? Just did, exact same behavior. Please, I need this machine to work, and it's becoming difficult to get it to boot a modern live CD, as they all apparently use the same boot sequence.
Like I said before, this is a kernel issue. The "Invalid block device" when trying to mount it by hand says as much. There isn't really much we can do about it. I suggest reporting this bug upstream with the kernel people.
I agree. This is especially noticeable since you experience this with other distributions, also. I can guarantee you of one thing. Gentoo's boot sequence matches nobody else's and isn't even close. This means the problem is with the kernel itself, and you'll need to take it up with them, unfortunately.
