When installing gentoo through knoppix (gentoo livecd does not boot) on a P4 2.8 HT with 875P chipset (MSI 875P Neo motherboard) and a Seagate SATA drive with Reiserfs file system connected to the ICH5 controller, the system is unable to finish the booting process. Even the 2.6.0 kernel does not help. Only switching from reiserfs back to ext3 has allowed the installation with the 2.6.0 kernel to work. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. use knoppix to boot the computer (gentoo livecd does not work, even the 2.6.0 one). 2. create the ext3 /boot partition and the reiserfs / partition as well as the swap partition (2GB in size). 3. follow the complete installation process described in the online help and install grub as boot loader. 4. Using the standard gentoo kernel, the system will be unable to boot. Installing the 2.6.0-test9-mm1 kernel does not solve the issue. Actual Results: The system was unable to complete the boot process. Expected Results: It should have worked without needing to switch back to ext3 instead of reiserfs. The hardware configuration is: MSI 875P Neo motherboard P4 2.8Ghz HT 2x512MB Corsair DDR400 memory Seagate Barracura SATA 120GB In the above URL you will find the complete discussion about the subject done in the gentoo forums. Since I did several things simultaneously I'm not 100% sure if reiserfs+sata is the real reason for the bug, but reinstalling the system with the 2.6.0-test9-mm1 kernel and using ext3 instead solved it. I have not added the output of emerge --info since I'm not finished installing the new computer. As soon as I have everything working I will update the information.
I'm not exactly sure what you want us to do. We don't develop most of the kernels, we just package them. Of the ones we do actually "develop", I'd say gentoo-test-sources, or gentoo-dev-sources are probably your best bets for getting things working. Keep in mind that most companies aren't jumping to release specs for their hardware, so it takes longer to get working drivers in Linux usually.
As you boot from knoppix, you're using a knoppix kernel and this is a knoppix bug. Send this off to the knoppix folks. If this needs a patch we can develop or backport, I'd be happy to do it. * Please * file another bug detailing why you are having problems with the LiveCD.
see also bug 20471 for sata support in livecd
Also, what symptoms did you get? Did the root filesystem simply refuse to mount? Hang? OOPS? ...
using 2.6.0test9 makes it very easy
