Lindsay Haisley posted on Sun, 20 Mar 2011 13:48:43 -0500 as excerpted: > On Sun, 2011-03-20 at 11:50 -0500, Lindsay Haisley wrote: >> This problem box has been running Gentoo since 2004, but my work and >> priorities on my time have changed over the years and it's probably >> time to move on. > > To be a bit more precise here, I'm actively working on replacing this > box, and will be running a Linux distribution on it other than Gentoo. > But in the meantime, I do need to solve the problem about which I > posted.
I appreciate that you /have/ decided to ultimately switch, and obviously believe it best or I'd have not recommend it. I also appreciate that you need a solution for now. That's what I suspect I may have provided (at least to a point) further down that post, which you may not have read given the order. I was hoping to read all these replies and have you tell me whether I was on the right track or not, answering the question about initrd/initramfs so we could go from there if need be. However, I don't see that answer, which suggests you didn't read that far down my post, for which I can't really blame you. But you can always go back and do it now... =:^) Briefly repeating so you can see if it's worth your trouble going back to get the details. If the kernel could not load its initial root, be that initr* or the real- root, it'd fail to load any userspace at all as it couldn't get to it, panicking instead when it couldn't get to a root at all. (I know this from experience.) Thus, that it's getting even a /limited/ userspace indicates it's getting to it's initial root. That's a very significant point. The question from there is whether that limited userspace is loading from the initrd/initramfs if you have one, indicating it's not successfully doing the initial real-root mount and pivot-root from the initr*, taking you down one path toward a solution (missing or incorrect drivers in the initr* or wrong initrd), or whether it's loading the real-root (as just getting to userspace at all indicates if you don't have an initr*), thus indicating that it has the necessary drivers (both pata and fs) to do so, and the problem is later, with the fsck or remount, taking you down a different path toward a solution (userspace issue). If that sounds useful, check the earlier post for more. If it doesn't, don't bother, as that's what I was detailing in the earlier post. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
