Bug 13732 – Athlon XP LiveCD Hangs at boot

• Product: Gentoo Release Media
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Chris O'Regan 2003-01-11 12:25:11 UTC]

I have an Athlon XP1700+ system. I am trying to install Gentoo 1.4RC2 from the
Athlon XP LiveCD but I cannot boot the operating system. It appears to be
getting stuck while scanning the drives. I have tried booting with several
different options as suggested (noapic, noscsi, apci=no) but with no effect.
Each time, it finds my DVD and CD-R drives (hda and hdd) and then hangs. One
thing to note is that my hard drives are not attached to the primary/secondary
IDE chain but rather are located on additional Ultra100 ports (hde and hdg). I
do notice that the kernel is finding the controller and it does see the drives.
I mention this because I have been experiencing problems with LILO when trying
to boot Debian 3.0 and RedHat 8.0 (Grub works fine in both cases). Otherwise, I
have had not boot problems with either of those distributions of Linux.

[Comment 1 Chris O'Regan 2003-01-16 12:52:39 UTC]

I worked around the problem by booting off an RC1 CD I had made earlier.  Once
the system was booted, I inserted the RC2 CD into my CD-R drive, mounted it as
/mnt/cdrom and followed the installation instructions.

[Comment 2 Bob Johnson (RETIRED) 2003-01-18 01:14:18 UTC]

Can you give more information about your computer , and ide controller brand 

[Comment 3 Chris O'Regan 2003-01-18 11:39:34 UTC]

I encountered the same problem while rebuilding a vanilla kernel (2.4.20) under
Debian.  Eventually I applied Alan Cox's patches (patch-2.4.20-ac2) and this
fixed it.  Seems like the IDE drivers in the stock kernel are buggy.

For reference, I have an Asus A7V266-E motherboard.  The primary and secondary
IDE are controlled by a VIA VT8233.  I have a Pioneer DVD-ROM attached as
primary/master and a Plextor CD-R attached as secondary/master.  I have two
disks attached to an on-board Promise PDC20265 IDE controller .  Each disk is on
its own chain set as master.  They are not configured as a RAID.  I have Windows
XP on the first disk, Linux (whatever distribution I am playing with at the
time) on the second.  I use GRUB as a boot loader as I know from first hand
experience that LILO does not support my configuration.

[Comment 4 Bob Johnson (RETIRED) 2003-01-18 11:56:48 UTC]

the kernels are slowly getting support for this chipset,  xfs-sources-pre5  has been reported to now work with this chipset. and ive addeed patches to gs-sources-r2. but no confirmation yet. This problem should be gone totally when 2.4.21 is released. 

[Comment 5 John Davis (zhen) (RETIRED) 2003-04-04 01:23:12 UTC]

db fix

[Comment 6 John Davis (zhen) (RETIRED) 2003-04-04 01:28:05 UTC]

db fix