"VFS: Insert root floppy and press ENTER", but no floppy

RedShirt · 02-04-2006, 10:27 AM

I have no desire to use floppy to boot this tower. I am TRYING to finish up a Gentoo install, but it isn't going too well. First I had grub issues, which I have finally sorted out. But now having completed install successfully, I get grub to load, and load my kernel. I have grub working, and it finds hd0 and fd0 just fine. However, it apparently seeks fd0 before hd0...

Apparently during boot though, it wants a boot floppy as I see this:

Code:

Root-NFS: No NFS server available, giving up.
VFS: Unable to mount root fs via NFS, trying floppy.
VFS: Insert root floppy and press ENTER

So when I finally thought I had got it, I don't. When I hit ENTER, kernel panic. I can't seem to hit anything else, it just won't understand that I want NO FRIGGIN FLOPPY. Hell, I don't even want NFS either, just boot my damned hard drive!

What can I do here?

(I have tried hiding the fd0 partition from grub, but as I have no disk in it, it finds no partition to hide.) I see this

Quote:

Note: If your system does not have any floppy drives, add the --no-floppy option to the above command to prevent grub from probing the (non-existing) floppy drives.

in the gentoo install docs, but where would I put that to make this happen, and would that get my kernel to load?

jomen · 02-05-2006, 12:41 PM

If you wanted "NO FRIGGIN FLOPPY" you should have told grub not to probe/look for one when you installed grub - that is what the quote you posted last is referring to.
But - this is obviously NOT causing your problem!
In your case - grub wants to boot off/over NFS and then falls back to floppy because it cannot find a server.
You should re-check your config-file ( /boot/grub/grub.conf or /boot/grub/menu.lst )
Second option:
use the grub command-line to boot - just press "c" at the splash-screen when grub comes up - everything is explained briefly and hitting "TAB" gives you autocompletion...

RedShirt · 02-05-2006, 02:02 PM

I have tried that, and in many ways... with using my (hd0,2) then /boot and just my boot drive(hd0,0) and nothing seems to help. I kinda progessed the problem over a while... getting various different but obviously the same errors until I changed things a ton from the grub.conf.

Now I am getting kernel panics without it looking for floppy, just can't find the drive, even though grub and the kernel can start loading, don't ask how that means it doesn't know where anything else... that just boggles my mind.

As much as I wanted to gentoo the hard way, I think I don't need to do gentoo the hard way. So I have downloaded a copy of RR64 and will see how that goes. If that continues to irk me with not allowing a network card, I will try the experimental gentoo gui installer from the expermintal live cd.

So much effort for so little results, what a picky set of junk.

jomen · 02-05-2006, 03:06 PM

Quote:

So much effort for so little results, what a picky set of junk.

don't think I got insulted or something in that direction - but I have to say:
there are literally thousands of users using gentoo and a _whole_ _lot_ more using grub to boot up their system...
It (in almost) all cases boils down to some flaw in configuration of grub due to not really grasping 1.) how it works and 2.) not applying the (excellent) installation guide correctly to their setup (often due to 1.) )
In Gentoo you have to configure this yourself - in other ditributions you might get lucky with the installation program which does the job for you.
Gentoo can be difficult to install for a number of reasons - none of it related specifically to Gentoo...
If you would give some info about your setup - we might even be able to help you getting this fixed.
For this we would need - for a start - the output of these commands (from the LiveCD-Environment - where you were setting up and installing grub):
fdisk -l -> the disk your installation is on if there are more than one
mount
ls -al /boot
ls -al /boot/grub
cat /boot/grub/grub.conf

There is no "hard way" but somtimes a little paitience is needed...

RedShirt · 02-05-2006, 05:13 PM

The guide is pretty good. I have to say having followed it it really well twice, I have almost no issue with the guide or the whole install of gentoo, to be honest. But it would appear, both times(attempt one, no boot partition, and attempt 2, a boot partition) grub seems to have eluded me. That quite infuriates me, as honestly grub APPEARS the whole time be acting the way it should. The tab completions go fine, the find finds what it supposed to, installation says it went fine... But something twitchy happens. I honestly can't believe it would be so difficult for grub to know what to load just by looking for for the files it needs, especially a fter it obviously loads itself, how can it not know where to go? NO matter how precisely I follow directions, or how many little tweaks and changes I make afterwards, it just doesn't want to load. I understand quite a few few people are running gentoo, and from what I have seen, I would love to have it up and running, but I can't say it seems to be worth the effort at this point.

I am going to give it one more shot, whole way through and see how it goes. If it goes this time, I will happy with saying I just did something wrong. But having followed all the directions and guides on previous attempts, I have to say I think something may just not quite work right on the AMD 64 bit installation instructions. If I have the same issues, I will post some info.

jomen · 02-05-2006, 06:59 PM

Quote:

don't think I got insulted or something in that direction

and I did not want to offend you eighter - BTW

I don't know if the instructions are any different for the architecture you seem to be using (AMD 64) but as for grub (/boot/grub/grub.conf):
root (hd0,0) refers to /dev/hda1 as the location of:
grub's files (/boot/grub/...stage-files... and config-files)
...where the kernel-image is (/boot/_kernel-image_)

the root=/dev/hdaX in the next line - right after: kernel /_name_of_your_kernel_
refers to where your file-system's / directory is

...and the grub-command-line did not work?
"c"
root (hd0,"TAB" -> choose your /boot partition
kernel /"TAB" -> choose ýour kernel there
boot
?

RedShirt · 02-05-2006, 07:19 PM

Quote:

...and the grub-command-line did not work?
"c"
root (hd0,"TAB" -> choose your /boot partition
kernel /"TAB" -> choose ýour kernel there
boot
?

To be honest, the tab completion worked.

Actually according the the grub documention (hd0) means first bios boot drive. Which for me is sda, not hda. And for me (hd0,0) means sda1, which is mapped to /boot. And the first thing I missed was setting sda1's boot flag. That is my problem with gentoo's install. It is REALLY picky about every single option, and all of it must be done manually. If you blink wrong and miss the tiniest thing...

Actually, on the gentoo forums, I think I see something... sda means special, also known to the kernel apparently as SCSI... which means:

Quote:

Under the SCSI section in make.menuconfig you need
Code:
SCSI device support
legacy /proc/scsi/ support
SCSI disk support
SCSI generic support - is a good idea but not needed to boot.

All these items must be built in[*]. Modules [M] will not work
Under SCSI low-level drivers you need
Code:
either Adaptec AIC7xxx Fast -> U160 support (New Driver)
or Adaptec AIC7xxx support (old driver) but not both

Again the selected option must be[*] not [M]

It can't read my sda1, because it can't find sda, possibly when I compiled the kernel. Apparently you also need to turn of devfs under virtual file systems when compiling the kernel if you are using anything past 2.6.12, which I am, and I don't think I did.

I think most of my issues are SATA related, not grub per se, and not AMD 64 per se, and not gentoo per se... And come to think of it, the gentoo install docs don't really go into much detail that there is any difference, let alone enough to merit kernel changes. That may mean my issues are with following too much to detail the gentoo install docs. I think I need to look closer in the forums at every sda step. I am really going to have to pay attention when attempting this for round 3.

I think I will put a comment in on the Gentoo forums too. They have some AMD 64 comments, but then no examples, they have 2 lines about sata drives, but none in the critical portions, apparently.

FYI:
fstab:

Code:

/dev/sda1                  /boot              ext3         defaults,noatime              1 2
/dev/sda2                  none              swap         sw                                 0 0
/dev/sda3                  /                    xfs           noatime,rw,owner            0 1 
/dev/cdrom                /mnt/cdrom    iso9660     noauto,ro                       0 0
/dev/dvdrecorder       /mnt/dvdr       subfs        noauto,fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8  0 0
/dev/fd0                    /mnt/floppy     auto         noauto                            0 0
/dev/hda1                  /hd1               reiserfs    auto,users,exec,rw,sync,owner 0 0
/dev/sdb1                  /hd2               reiserfs    auto,users,exec,rw,sync,owner 0 0

proc                          /proc              proc         defaults                           0 0

shm                          /dev/shm        tmpfs       nodev,nosuid,noexec        0 0

grub.conf:

Code:

default 0
timeout 20
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.15
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/Gentoo-2.6.15 root=/dev/sda3 vesafb=0x31B

jomen · 02-05-2006, 08:05 PM

This did not occur to me - since I don't have such a system (SATA)...
1.) what I know about SATA-Drives:
You need to compile in (NOT modules):
Device Drivers -> SCSI device support -> SCSI low-level drivers -> Serial ATA (SATA) support -> and (possibly) the apropriate driver from this catecory -which becomes available, when having selected "Serial ATA (SATA) support"
lspci -v can help with determining this...
and:
Device Drivers -> ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support -> Enhanced IDE/MFM/RLL disk/cdrom/tape/floppy support -> and possibly: ...there -> Include IDE/ATA-2 DISK support
2.)
devfsd is gone...
udev - together with hotplug - is now handling the /dev entries
having devfsd enabled in kernel-config should not hurt - it just will not do anything anymore
in: File systems -> Pseudo filesystems -> /proc file system support and -> Virtual memory file system support (former shm fs)

Your grub.conf should work - as soon as SATA is working properly
...and
I read comments about how to configure grub properly especially for SATA-systems:
in this line:

Quote:

kernel /boot/Gentoo-2.6.15 root=/dev/sda3 vesafb=0x31B

you should not leave out the grub-notation for where the kernel is - which means:
put:
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/Gentoo.... in there instead of just:
kernel /boot/Gentoo...

BTW: I don't even have a:
root (hd0,0) in my grub.conf - and it works flawlessly - maybe because of the splashimage=...setting
so grub itself seems not to be particularly picky - as long as you have drivers for your HD
This might be another reference for troubleshooting:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/grub-error-guide.xml