I have an NFORCE3 250 dual Opteron mobo. It has NVidia and SIL3144 SATA chips. From the 2004.2 livecd, after 'modprobe ide_disk', I could fdisk, format and access partitions on disks attached to either the NVidia or SIL controller. No matter whether I select the obsoleted ide_disk or new libata SATA support in the kernel, if advanced partition type support for windows dynamic disks is also compiled in (I did not try it as a module), then my kernel cannot recognize my Linux partitions. It would recognize the disk (either hdg [ide_disk] or sda [libata]) and throw an error stating "Unknown Partition Table". Then when the kernel tried to find my root partition, I would get a VFS kernel panic telling me to specify the correct root= parameter to the kernel. The only change I made to my kernel was to remove advanced partition support and now it boots just fine. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 0. Have a system where kernel root is on a SATA drive 1. Build kernel gentoo-dev-sources 2.6.8-r4 (experienced on others, too ) 2. Include libata (SATA) support under SCSI device drivers 3. Include Advanced Filesystem support for windows dynamic disks under File Systems 4. Boot system. You will get an error ask drive is recognized stating "Unknown Partition Table" Actual Results: I get a kernel panic Expected Results: I expect it to be able to read my disk.
Could you please test development-sources-2.6.9 and maybe 2.6.10-rc1 also? If the problem is still present there then it would be worth reporting it at http://bugzilla.kernel.org
It'll be a week or so before I can rebuild an AMD 64 box, but I'll try those when I do.
Ok, please reopen this bug when you can do that.
OK, finally got a chance to build that box again. This time w/ kernel gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.9-r1. I'm booting from a PATA drive and I have the libata sata drivers compiled as modules and I still get the same kernel panic if I have advanced partition types compiled.
Please file this at bugzilla.kernel.org, as it's an upstream issue, not a gentoo specific one.
Submitted upstream http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3733
