I have decided to put gentoo linux on my older computer. I want to also have a working windows xp media center on it as well. The computer's specs (as I know they are important for gentoo so I'll list them to get that out of the way) are:

AMD Sempron 3100+
2 512mb DDR XMS2 Pro Corsair Ram
150 gig Seagate Hdd Secondary Master
10 gig Maxtor Hdd Secondary Slave
Dvd Rom Primary Master
CD burner Primary Slave
Nvidia 6800 AGP8x
Netgear Wireless card (not currently in use)
Ethernet bridge (currently used for internet connections)


My goal for a final product of a system is a drive structure that follows:

/dev/hda

1: NTFS Windows J: drive (just extra space for windows) around 100 gigs

2: Ext2 boot section for linux (the gentoo guide told me to and I would have made it the first partition, but I didn't want to delete the windows partition) 32MB

3: Swap 2 gigs

4: Reiserfs linux Rest of drive


/dev/hdb

1: NTFS Windows Primary partiton (this is where windows is installed)


Alright, so that pretty much sums it up. I plan on posting problems here as I go along. I will definitely try to find the solutions to these on my own, but I may ask certain questions just to make sure.

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Current Status:

I've got a live cd version of gentoo downloaded. I've also partitioned the drive. I downloaded stage3 and portage. I extracted both and I'm now setting up the /mnt/gentoo/etc/make.conf file.

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Question 1:

So my first question comes in setting up this make.conf file. I have an AMD Sempron and I want to optimize gcc so I'm editing the CFlags and CXXFlags. I did a little research to see what I should put as my processor type because the example file lists the possible choices as: athlon-xp, ahthlon-mp, athlon-tbird, athlon, k6, k6-2, i386, i486, i586 (Pentium), i686 (Pentium Pro) and then a bunch of pentiums. I found that the Sempron is listed under the AMD64 at wikipedia here.

I was wondering what I should put as my processor.

Well, if you feel up to downloading another CD, get the AMD64 live CD, so you can put together a 64 bit system. Otherwise, I think athlon-xp is the most advanced of the available architectures with the 32 bit installation.

first, you don't actually need to have the boot on its own partition, I never do

as for the CPU type, if you are going to go 64-bit, then do AMD64 (you must have the AMD64 liveCD), otherwise use athlon-xp (although you might be able to get away with P4, as the AMD64 does support SSE2, and the athlon-xp doesn't - but I'd just stick with the athlon-xp )

Before you decide to make the jump to 64-bit (and I think you should), glance over this wiki article, as it outlines some of the pitfalls of running 64-bit http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_AMD64

Wow, I never realized that my sempron was a 64 bit processor. I always assumed it was 32bit. Well, this changes everything. I might want to completely redo the install with 64 bit in mind, but I'm going to look over that article first. I'll keep you posted as to what I choose.

well, it depends on *which* sempron you have. It is fully possible for that to only be a 32-bit sempron processor. Sempron is the AMD equivalent of the Celeron, it is constantly updated to whatever the old technology is. So there are both 32-bit only and 32/64-bit Semprons out there

The easiest way to tell if its 64-bit or not is to find out what motherboard model you have. If it is socket 754 or 939, then its a 64-bit sempron

I have the 64 bit version. I went ahead and just installed the 32bit version of gentoo.

Ok, so using this guide, I finished the live cd work and I went to reboot my computer. Grub loaded and I was given the options that I added in the grub.conf file. Unfortunately, that's when shit started to hit the fan. I tried to boot into Gentoo, but it failed and had a big error message (which I'm way to tired to post up here tonight after doing 5 straight hours of installing gentoo via a command prompt. I also tried booting into the recovery mode, and that failed with the same message (something about the kernel panicking and it not being able to detect root). I also tried booting into windows, but that just gave me a black screen. So right now, I have a computer which can load grub, and give me a minimal command prompt and I have the gentoo live cd. What should I do to retrieve the information necessary to get some help on this? Can I get it from grub, or is there a way I can mount the partitions I made in grub and get it?

At least the gentoo grub splash looks sweet

Noo! what have you done!?!?

Why didn't you just use the graphical installer??? It will even give you enough binaries to get an Xorg server and a Gnome session up and running! (its the big icon on the desktop labeled "Install Gentoo" with some reference to it being the GTK version )

I figured if I was going to install gentoo, I was going to do it the hard core way. I think I did everything else correct, so could I just get some help fixing grub?

If the kernel panics and can't detect your root, that means you screwed up configuring the kernel, its not a GRUB problem. My guess is that you didn't enable support for your file systems (you need in-kernel support, not module, for ext2 and whatever your primary partition is - my guess is thats either ext3 or ReiserFS)

Fortunately its easily fixed. Just launch the liveCD, do the chroot part (see the handbook for the specifics), and then just jump down to the configure kernel part and try again

Although next time you are asking for help it would really help to include the actual error messages - those exist for a reason

I was planning on posting that up today because as I said before, I was really tired last night. I'll go ahead and give it another go, but I'm 90% confident that I enabled ext2 and reiserfs support in the kernel.

Post up your grub.conf file here then, you might be passing it the wrong root argument

Grub Config:



Error Message when booting into Gentoo:



Message when booting into windows:



On both boots it just hangs right there.

for the windows you are missing an = sign after title, not sure if that is the cause of the problem or not

as for the linux one, my other guess is that you don't have the driver support for your chipset enabled (again, not as a module, but built-in) - if you give me an lspci from the liveCD I can try and help you track down which kernel option it is, but I'd start with looking through Device Drivers->ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support->PCI IDE chipset support

I realize that about the windows one, but I didn't think it was a problem because the example one didn't have an equals sign.

Would these drivers in the kernel also be affecting the windows boot? Because if this thing can't boot windows even after we fix gentoo, than I might as well start all over again with the graphical installer because you know that that works.

Ok, this looks fairly likely that these drivers are the problem. I did an lspci and instead of retyping an enourmous list of devices, I'll only type those that are applicable:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 760/M760 Host (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SG86C202
00:02.0 ISA bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS964 [MuTIOL Media IO] (rev 36)
00:02.6 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE] (rev 01)
...
00:05.0 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] RAID bus controller 180 SATA/PATA [SiS] (rev 01)
...
00:18.0 Host Bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athalon64/Opteron] Hyper Transport Technology Configuration
and some other Host Bridges then it mentions my graphics card

The most important one there is the SiS IDE interface. Be sure your kernel is compiled with a driver for that (not as a module). If in doubt, just compile something in. Heck, for my gentoo installation (which finally has GNOME), I built an obscenely small amount of loadable modules, and built everything I thought I might need right into the kernel.

Ok, I'll give compiling the kernel another go. I guess I didn't add sufficient support for my hardware.

Not in the least. Try adding the = sign first (since it is supposed to be there). If that doesn't work, what could be happening, however, is that the windows boot loader is for some reason not there or not working. What I would do would be to pull out the harddrive with linux on it (hda), and then enter the recovery mode and tell it to fix/restore the MBR and anything boot related.



Just a hint, while going through the module you can click the little "Help" button and it will give a description of whatever you have highlighted - that sometimes lists the models that the driver is for

Oh, I know why windows isn't booting. I definitely disabled the boot option on that drive because I wanted to be sure that it wouldn't boot off of that instead of grub. Ok, so that's an easy fix. Now just recompiling the kernel...

Edit: That was NOT the problem. Hmmmmm I didn't have time to recompile the kernel tonight, but I should tomorrow.

Any updates? How goes the Gentoo? Did you try my suggestion for fixing the non-booting windows (the pulling out the linux drive and doing a windows recovery console fix mbr and fix boot)?

Changing the windows part of the grub.conf file didn't work. I have yet to recompile the kernel, but I'll be able to better diagnose the current situation then.

Sorry for the lack of updates recently.