# Gigabyte (P35,ICH9) - no boot from LiveCD

## STreen

Hello,

I've got a problem booting gentoo on a new machine.

I switched to a Gigabyte P35-DS3 (P35 North Brigde and ICH9 South Bridge Chipsets) and can't boot from the LiveCD anymore.

I'm tried an old 2004.3 version one 2006.1 and another one from 2008.

I'm getting the error message like this:

```
Activating mdev...

.

.

No Media found

Could not find CD to boot, something else needed

Could not find the root block device in .
```

I have one DVD-RW and one HDD connected as IDE devices. The AHCI controller is disabled in BIOS and the control mode set to IDE.

I also tried using the non-framebuffer option on boot, tried nosata, ide=all-generic, nodetect and noapic.

It's always the same.

An Arch Linux bootable CD (from 2007) is working, though.

Just no idea why the gentoo LiveCD is not. I researched the internet and tried some stuff as described above, but nothing helpful yet.

----------

## Monkeh

The kernel on the current CDs doesn't support the PATA controller.

----------

## BradN

Almost any livecd should be suitable to install gentoo with, so you could actually just use that arch linux CD if you wanted to.  It just limits you to downloading the stage x tarball on the spot rather than copying it from the CD.  The install steps would be the same otherwise, except probably the livecd sets up your network connection for you (or is done differently).

That way, you can get things going and worry more about getting gentoo's kernel compiled for your hardware rather than screwing with the livecd that might not work right anyway.

----------

## STreen

Thanks for your replies.

As none of my older and newer LiveCDs would work I was thinking it is some incompatibility between the gentoo kernel and the chipsets on my new motherboard. The thing monkeh said is new to me for example.

I've still got a gentoo installation on my hard drive and was going to make it run again. For that I can use my arch cd, chroot into the gentoo installation and recompile the kernel for the new hardware. But I'm also trying to figure out whats wrong with booting from the live cds all the sudden.  :Wink: 

----------

## BradN

Yeah, that should be a good approach.  If you really want to get the livecd working, there's plenty of docs and threads on mastering new live-cd's  :Wink: 

----------

## Monkeh

 *STreen wrote:*   

> Thanks for your replies.
> 
> As none of my older and newer LiveCDs would work I was thinking it is some incompatibility between the gentoo kernel and the chipsets on my new motherboard. The thing monkeh said is new to me for example.
> 
> I've still got a gentoo installation on my hard drive and was going to make it run again. For that I can use my arch cd, chroot into the gentoo installation and recompile the kernel for the new hardware. But I'm also trying to figure out whats wrong with booting from the live cds all the sudden. 

 

As I said, the kernel does not support the PATA controller on your board. You'll need at least a 2.6.24 kernel.

----------

## STreen

Another problem is coming up.

I booted the arch cd, chrooted into the gentoo installation and there where already the 2.6.24.r3 sources downloaded. So I just configured them for the new hardware including support for the older IDE devices.

But when booting the kernel it couldn't detect any of the hard drive partitions.

I reinstalled grub on hda and configured it to use root=/dev/hda3 (as before) but it can't detect the root partition there. It also quits with a line like:

```
Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions:
```

But it lists none. Is this because of lacking hardware support in the kernel ?

I also gave it a shot trying root=/dev/sda3 (because arch emulates ide drives as scsi devices and I wanted to be sure that gentoo doesn't do the same thing recently).

----------

## Zhaozhou

I've got a G33, almost the same motherboard as you. I've got AHCI enabled both for IDE and SATA, works like a charm.

----------

## BradN

I would run lspci on the arch CD - that should tell you what hard drive controller you have, and then you can look to make sure you include support for it in the kernel config.  Keep in mind if you use a libata driver (SATA/PATA section instead of normal IDE), then even your IDE drives will be named as scsi devices (eg, /dev/sda, sdb, etc).

----------

## _pi

Try the 2007 CD I used that one. I have P35-DS3R

----------

## STreen

Thank you all.

What I got working again is the hardware detection of my ide drives. I forgot to compile the JMicron driver as it seems.

Another problem now is, that before there had been 3 ide devices connected (2 hard drives and 1 dvd-rw). For the new machine I decided to only use the one hdd and dvd-rw. But because of physical limitations I was only able to connect those two in a different way than before and now the dvd-rw is the master and the hdd is the slave at the ide port.

Before, the system used to refer to my main hd as hda and now it is hdb. So I changed the boot options accordingly and grub won't complain. But after loading the new kernel there is another problem.

The system won't boot because of an error I also found via google, but no fitting solution for me:

```
.

.

Mounting /dev for udev

mount command failed with error:

   wrong fs type, bad option, ...
```

I assumed that there is still somethingnot adjusted to the new connection of the drives and booted from cd again to look into /sys in my old installation. And there are, of course, still all the old information stored about what drives are connected to the ide bus.

So, I really don't know that well how the /sys dir is organized. Is there any easy way to update the information there for the new connection layout, apart from editing it manually ?

I also looked into the /sys dir of the temporary arch system I booted from the cd. I thought I could try to just copy the actual information from there into the old /sys.

----------

## Zhaozhou

If it's actual IDE drives you got there, you can just alter the jumpers.

If it's SATA, why not run it under AHCI?

You have to compile in tmpfs, it's under psuedo filesystems.

----------

## STreen

Hm, this doesn't do it. I jumpered the hard drive as master and the dvd-rw as slave. When booting the HDD is now  recognised as hda again, I changed fstab accordingly and tried booting it. But the same error keeps occuring.

----------

## Zhaozhou

File systems -> Psuedo Filesystems -> Virtual memory file system support (former shm fs)

----------

## STreen

With Vmfs support my old installation boots up again, thanks for the hint.

Although it now has several problems detecting hardware. Udev is giving an error message at boot, about getting a socket.

I think I will just reinstall gentoo as I would recompile the whole stuff anyways.

The 2007 CD is working, at last I found one to get me online - the Arch bootable cd doesn't support pppoe...

----------

## Zhaozhou

Wait!

The socketproblem is because you have networking compiled as a module. Set "Packet socket" and "Usix domain socket" as compiled-in.

----------

