I just build the 2.6.8 kernel using a gentoo liveCD(with basically all the FS supported compiled in the kernel). My / and /usr partition are reiserfs and /boot is ext3 (those are the only partition i have). When I boot however, the kernel can't read my /dev/hda with the following err:

hda: read_intr: status=0x59
hda: read_instr: error=0x10
hda: cannot handle device with more than 16 heads - giving up
end_request: I/O error on device hda, sector 15482872
Buffer I/O error on device hda, logical block 1935359

and then of course can't mount any FS:
Block device /dev/hda6 is not a valid root device
The root block device is unspecified or not detected

I don't seem to have problem when I formated my FS using ext3 before. I am just experimenting with reiserfs now, and I run into this. Help please!

Do you have support for reiserfs built into your kernel, and do you have support for your IDE controller? If you don't have the proper IDE options you are likely to get this kind of errors because the kernel doesn't know how to handle the IDE controller and defaults to generic IDE access.


Håkan

yep spot on hw-tph, this is not a reiserfs problem looks to me almost like you did not select lba support quote("cannot handle device with more than 16 heads"), so looks like linux found the controller and probed it for devices, and on attempting to access the hdd determined that is does not have support for it.

But this is certainly not a reiserfs problem

How do I turn on lba then? From grub maybe?

I just reformated all the partitions and build 2.6.8 on them again...this time, it still wouldn't boot, but the error is a little different:

hda: 7560MB CHS=1024/240/63 (looks like it finally reads it)
devfs_mk_dir: invalid argument. <6> hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 < >

I enable /dev fs in kernel config and mount /dev at boot...Is that bad?