Im trying to start an installation of Gentoo following the online instructions but Gentoo freezes up at the file system creation step. Specifically when I do a mke2fs -j /dev/hde1 the creation proceeds until I get this message and then the whole system locks up: "Writing superblock and file system accounting information: _" I'm using a Western Digital serial ATA HD, the WD360 (Raptor) and a generic serial ATA adapter board (http://www.kuroutoshikou.com/products/serialata/serialata-pci.html) When I first boot up the PC a message comes up from the serial ATA controller board saying that it detected my HD on interface 1 and nothing on interface 2. Then normal BIOS messages come up (though nothing saying that a HD has been detected). Gentoo loads from CD and properly detects the serial ATA controller board and my hard drive. I can even use fdisk to write partitions to the HD. However trying to create a file system causes the system to lock up. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Partition the HD 2. try to create an ext3 partition using this command # mke2fs -j /dev/hde1 Actual Results: File system creation starts and the the whole system locks up after this message is printed: "Writing superblock and file system accounting information: _" The system needs to be powered down, even a Ctrl-Alt-Del does not work. Expected Results: A brand new file system on the specified partition Could this be related to the serial ATA controllercard I am using or the hard drive? The board uses the Silicon Image 3112 chipset which I though was Linux compatible but I might be wrong ...
Have you tried to create a different filesystem, like reiserfs, on the disk? You can also try a 2.6 LiveCD.
I have similar effects in a running system. I have installed with a LiveCD rc4 with (smp) kernel 2.4.21pre(something) because this was the only kernel on the LiveCD which supported the SiI3112 chipset. With this kernel I had no problems. But since kernel 2.4.22 (I think) I get such lockups if "heavy" I/O is done to the SATA Disk (sometimes while updatedb is running or emerges) (it's a Seagate hard drive so it seems to me the drive is not the errornous part). I have searched the web heavily and found out that more people have also such problems (many of these posts have been filed in Sept/03). Some of them resolved it by disabling ACPI - some by disabling APIC (in BIOS). But none of these resolotions worked for me. IMHO they are reffering to another problem with similay but not the same sympthoms. Their problem was IMHO fixed by Alan Cox in kernel 2.4.22. I can also definitely say that my problem has nothing to do with DMA (what moste of these people believe), because SiI starts up in PIO mode, and FSCK is done before hdparm, and I also get it every FSCK session. So I have to abort the check every day to be able to use my system. :-( I'm using reiserfs on my system partition and ext3 on my data partition. I can produce the error on both. The error is not absolutely random. I had the problem once while doing an emerge. The system locked up and I did a reset. At recovery of the reiserfs root partition it locked up again. I reseted a second time and it locked up at the same point. Then I put in my LiveCD (with kernel 2.4.21pre(something)), booted the smp kernel, and mounted the disk. It recovered without crash. Then I rebooted and was able to use my system again.
Kernel v2.6-test9 ChangeLog says: "<jgarzik@redhat.com> [libata] Merge Serial ATA core, and drivers for: Intel ICH5 (production) ServerWorks / Apple K2 (beta) VIA (beta) Silicon Image 3112 (broken!) Various Promise (alpha/beta)" And the Silicon Image 3112 driver is not mentioned in a later ChangeLog so upgrading to a 2.6 kernel might possibly not help. I have successfully installed gentoo on a hard disk connected to a Promise Serial ATA Controller (mentioned as alpha/beta above) which I could NOT get working on a 2.4 kernel.
Is this still an issue?
I had the same problem. It is (most probably) a incompatibility from SII chipset driver and the (obsolete) SCSI emulation. Turn off SCSI emulation and it should work. OR Turn off the SII chipset support. You will find your harddisk then emulated as scsi-device. It will work with the +2.6.0 kernel and sii-support as module. (running on it since 4 months without a problem)
old bug, reopen if necessary
