(Admittedly quick and dirty response) On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 11:18 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Something went haywire with my 8 or 9 year old dual Opteron ~amd64 system > last night. I may have a bricked system. I haven't given up yet, but I may > have to buy a replacement system. I have external USB drive backups, but the > only other computer I have right now is an old Mac laptop which can't read > Linux LVM partitions. > > Questions: > > 1. I don't remember, and can't look up, the make.conf processor flags I > emerge with. But it is dual Opterons, and ~amd64. How compatible could that > be with modern Intel CPUs? I know Intel adopted the extra registers of the > AMD64 instruction set, but are there other differences which would prevent an > Opteron system from running as is under an Intel processor? Maybe AMD still > sells Opterons, and I will be stuck with building a system.
I'm not aware of any currently-sold AMD or Intel x86 processors (except, *maybe* Atom) which don't handily support x86_64. You should have no problem here. > > 2. Is it feasible to buy some commodity box, like from Dell, with an > Intel processor, and plug in my two SATA SSD drives and get a console boot? > I don't give a fig right now about any GUI interface, and even Internet is > not the problem. If it will boot and run emerges, I can import the source > files for X and Ethernet and other peripherals via USB stick. But SATA > drivers ... Depends on if you have the necessary drivers installed, but yes, it's a recoverable scenario. You might need to boot a live CD and compile and install a kernel with the right drivers. It'd be like installing Gentoo fresh, but skipping 95% of the handbook. > > 3. My kernels always have just about every driver compiled in as > modules, an old habit from when I used to swap in PCI cards like crazy. I > don't remember now how many SATA drivers are built in and how many are > modules; if the commodity box needs SATA drivers which aren't built in, that > could get tricky. Are there boot command line options to preload certain > modules? Might not do me any good. I think I could scrape by with USB > modules, but not SATA. NAFAIK. I'd just use the Gentoo live CD image. > > For the curious, here is wat happened. When I left off last night, the USB > keyboard was only recognized when I unplugged all other USB devices, and the > system hung at the grub point, with a blank screen. > > A reboot failed because it couldn't find the root=/dev/sde drive. But > the USB keyboard was working because I used it in grub to select a new 3.7.0 > kernel (had been running 3.6.8). > > A second reboot ignored the USB keyboard and generated an ATA error I had > never seen before for every ATA drive and some I don't have, all the way up > to ATA13 before I rebooted it again. I haven't got it to boot even this far > since, so I can't regenerate that error. There was a 5 second or so delay > between these errors, making me think the ATAnn designator might not be > different drives, just retries. > > It booted a rescue DVD, but without the keyboard it was kind of > pointless, and it hung after showing two lines which I believe are unrelated > other than a place marker (generating xxx key, generating RSA key). > > The keyboard wasn't even recognized by the BIOS. I finally disconnected > every USB device, all the ubs, and then the keyboard worked. > > But when I left it last night, it wouldn't even bring up the grub screen. > All the BIOS screens show the usual disk drives. > > The system was working perfectly fine before all hell broke loose. The > keyboard was recognized during grub the first time, but after that only if > all other USB devices were disconnected. The disk drives acted funny during > the boot, first with the unknown root- device error, then with the funky ATA > errors, and finally with not even bringing up grub. > > I will try some more desperate tricks today, like reconnecting the USB pile > to see if it at least boots the disks again - is my choice between disks and > keyboard? I will find out. My best guess right now is that booting 3.7.0 is > what clobbered things; whether I added a option which loaded bad firmware, or > 3.7.0 is broken, I have no idea. It could well be something unrelated to > 3.7.0. My goal for today is to try to get keyboard and disk working, then > boot with 3.6.8. Pull out an old PS2 keyboard. Sometimes, that's the easiest way to get things going. -- :wq
