I just finished installing Gentoo on an older AMD laptop. There was one major problem that I hacked around, and things appear to be working OK, but I still get warnings when installing lilo.
When I first did the install, I got the warning message... "Could not determine root partition!". I ran lilo and rebooted, but got a kernel panic, because the kernel couldn't find the boot device. I dug into this. Apparently the lilo ebuild tries to outsmart the user, and figure out the root partition itself, with the bash syntax... rootpart="$(mount | grep -v "tmpfs" | grep -v "rootfs" | grep "on / " | cut -f1 -d " ")" I don't know if I screwed up during the install, but *IN THE CHROOT*, mount returns a null string. I remembered vaguely that "mount" returns the contents of /etc/mtab. I looked at it, and /etc/mtab was also empty. I applied the "rootpart=" stuff against another machine, and found out which line it homed in on. I manually edited /etc/mtab in the chroot, inserting the short line... 805 ...Then I emerged lilo again. This time I got... ##################################################################### >>> Installing (1 of 1) sys-boot/lilo-23.2-r2 * Checking for LILO ... Yes, on /dev/sda * Running DOLILO to complete the install ... You can move /etc/conf.d/dolilo.example to /etc/conf.d/dolilo and edit it to set your preferences. fdisk: cannot open 80: No such file or directory fdisk: cannot open 80: No such file or directory Bootsector updated succesfully. ##################################################################### The important part is that the laptop now boots up OK. However, when I re-install lilo, on the natively-booted laptop, I still get the above messages. I'm using the same partitioning scheme and fstab that I've been using for years without problems. Here they are... outfput from "fdisk -l" ##################################################################### Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes, 625142448 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x612cf108 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 2048 625142447 312570200 5 Extended /dev/sda5 4096 618495 307200 83 Linux /dev/sda6 620544 17397759 8388608 83 Linux /dev/sda7 17399808 625142447 303871320 83 Linux ##################################################################### /etc/fstab ######################################################################### /dev/sda5 / ext2 noatime,nodiratime,async 0 1 /dev/sda7 /home ext3 noatime,nodiratime,async 0 1 /home/bindmounts/opt /opt auto bind 0 0 /home/bindmounts/var /var auto bind 0 0 /home/bindmounts/usr /usr auto bind 0 0 /home/bindmounts/tmp /tmp auto bind 0 0 /dev/sda6 none swap sw 0 0 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,users,ro 0 0 /dev/sr0 /mnt/dvd auto noauto,users,ro 0 0 devpts /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0 ######################################################################### Any ideas? -- Walter Dnes <[email protected]> I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications
