I just installed Gentoo 1.4 on a Pentium II machine with an ASUS motherboard that includes an on-board Adaptec AIC7890 SCSI controller. After going through the entire installation guide, I rebooted my newly installed Gentoo box for the first time. During storage detection (directly after the initial RAMDISK is loaded) the messages indicate the controller is found, as well as the Seagate harddisk that is attached to it. However, something goes wrong after that. I'm not sure exactly what it is (the messages scroll by a little too quickly), but in the end two sets of messages keep coming up alternatingly, effectively bringing the boot process to a halt. The first set of messages ends with "Dump Card State Ends", the other with "Yikes!!! There is a loop in the free list!". My first guess would be that this is a hardware-related problem, but the problem does not occur with the kernel on the LiveCD (2.4.21-gss), but only with the one I built during Gentoo installation (2.4.20-gentoo-r6). The LiveCD boots fine, including the aic7xxx driver (I can see and access /dev/sda and /dev/sda1, and /proc/modules includes aic7xxx). I would hate to have to get out the soldering iron and use it to disable the controller on my motherboard, so I a hope you guys have some other suggestions. Thanks in advance, Rutger
Can you try using a vanilla 2.4.20 or 2.4.21 kernel to see if this is a gentoo-kernel or a kernel-kernel problem? Another suggestion is to use anything above 2.5.42 [ big aic7xxx rewrite according to a diff ], preferably try 2.6...
I tried the 2.4.22_pre2-gss kernel (as you know that's nearly the same one that is on the LiveCD) and the problem still occured, while the LiveCD does boot. I guess the initrd on the LiveCD differs from the one that genkernel generates, so I dropped the initrd line from grub and now I AM able to boot successfully. How likely is it that a build of a vanilla kernel will yield me an initrd file that works, now that the problem does not seem to be located in the kernel itself?
I do not see why it uses an initrd unless the kernel has to preconfigure the SCSI device, which it does not... Are you using the graphical splash/is genkernel [trying to] create one? If you are/it is, this is most likely genkernel not generating the correct framebuffer stuff. Try using the initrd which comes with the "bootsplash" package and see if that causes the same problem.
Can you try doing a manual kernel build? If you still get the problem, can you please post your kernel .config and post a follow-up message?
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