How's it done?

kernel-2.6.11-gentoo-r7 on an nForce3 250Gb Chipset.

To begin with, I went the genkernel way (which makes it boot initrd first to detect the hardware [I think]). It begins to boot, but then tells me it can't find the specified boot partition, ( /dev/sda8 ), and gives me a boot prompt.

I can type "shell" and I find myself in a strange ash shell I think - I'm guessing the root is a ramdisk... And there are no /dev/sda entries.


The make menuconfig route, (which allows you to configure your kernel directly, thus eliminating the need for initrd [I think]), following the instructions given in the online docs and not really changing anything else, makes a kernel which won't boot at all - it just says "kernel panic" and gives up.

You can have a look at my grub.conf if you like:

I know there must be loads out there on this, but I've Googled, and done a search here, and I can't find anyone with my exact problem.

Apologies for length - I'm just trying to be helpful to all those fine people who I hope will help me

Napalm Llama

Think you'll find that SATA drives are seen by the kernel as SCSI devices

So SCSI support needs to be built into the kernel, not as a module

Genkernel does not do this by default

If you want to use genkernel do

This will allow you to make changes to the kernel via menuconfig but still provide you with initrd-2.6.11-gentoo-r7-1

Otherwise if you feel confident just use menuconfig

Hope this helps

Pete

Hurrah! It helped! Thankyou kindly!

Now I've just got to get Xorg up and running so I can see things properly... links does a good job in text mode, but it's still no match for Firefox...

Ah well. Emerging as I speak. Let's just hope it works this time

Napalm Llama

Sounds like you still have a long way to go

Gnome or Kde takes a very looooooooooong time to compile

Good luck

Pete

If you configure and compile the kernel yourself and you made SATA and scsi as modules, you just need to specify --with when using mkinitrd. You may need to install mkinitrd. genkernel just takes all the fun out of configuring and compiling the kernel.

It took about 17 hours to compile gnome and kde.

Wow that's a long time.

I've figured it out, though (thanks to Pete M) - I'm currently booted off the hd, in Fluxbox @ 1280x1024, typing away merrily into my Firefox.

I've been trying to compile gnome, but for some reason the system freezes up every time.

On the bright side, I didn't chuck all that hard-saved money away - before I went to bed last night, it was about halfway through its 148 gnome packages, and it'd only been an hour or two. This AMD64 really is fast!

I used a Pentium 4 2.0 GHZ (Northwood core) with 512 MB of ECC Rambus memory. It emerged about 214 packages. It seem that it compiled all of them instead of using binary. AMD processors are always faster than Intel processors when it comes time to compile. I recommend using ECC memory to minimize long period compiling problems.

Napalm Llama, not all programs can be compile with a CFLAG option -m64. Try using -m64 only for multimedia programs where high data bandwidth is needed. You probably want to add -mfpmath=387 because AMD64 processors are not very efficient when handling SSE.

Is -m64 the same as using "-march=k8"?

I've traced the complie problem back to Ghostscript though -- apparently this is a known issue.

Yes, but k8 has optimized compile options designed only for Athlon 64-bit processors.

So are you suggesting that if I temporarily remove the "-march=k8" (I have an Athlon64) it could solve some of the problems?