Gentoo Installation Stuff
OK, so I'm installing Gentoo linux on a box with a lot of foibles: Dual pIII-800mHz processors, AIC-7892 RAID controller, SCSI everything (including CDROM), two network cards, and, believe it or not, I've been getting some errors. Ha ha.

SO, in an effort to help those who come after me to fix these problems that I've wasted so much fugging time on, here is an annotated list of my problems and their solutions.

1) "/bin/ash - can't access tty; job control turned off"

When I first started up the installation disc (i.e. first time EVER), I ran both the "gentoo" and "smp" kernels, only to receive the error message above.

Quickly: The problem was the SCSI CDROM. The solution is to use "smp doscsi" instead, but that may produce another problem (#2 below)

2) SCSI detect hangs on "sym53c8xx"

"smp doscsi" fixes problem #1, but creates problem #2. Apparantly, the "sym53c8xx" module behaves poorly, as does the "aic7xxx" module.

Quickly: Use "gentoo doscsi" instead of "smp doscsi" even though it's a multi-processor environment. Since I'm building my own kernel this time around (yay!) I should be able to put the smp environment back in place afterwards.

3) "Missing kernel or user mode driver aic79xx"

It repeats 3 times after "successfully" booting into gentoo environment. Most of the gentoo forums posts just say to ignore this. I'm gonna try fdisk first and just see what I can do.

Quickly: It doesn't seem to matter, so no worries

4) Drive partitioning

So, I partitioned my drive thusly:

/dev/sda1==64MB /boot [[ext2]]
/dev/sda2==1024MB swap (512M of actual RAM)
/dev/sda3==16,000MB extended partition
/dev/sda5==512MB /var [[reiserFS]]
/dev/sda6==512MB /tmp [[reiserFS]]
/dev/sda7==15,000MB / [[reiserFS]]

5) Cannot umount SCSI CD during installation

So I put my preferred stage (yes, I'm a stage3 weenie) onto a separate CD for installation, owever, when I try to umount my drive, I get a "Drive Busy" error

Quickly: Luckily, my network is just fine, so I decide to just kill twenty minutes downloading the stage3 tarball.

OK.. now I'm compiling the kernel. I'll write a part 2 if anything weird happens from here on out.


- posted by frank crist @ 9:42 PM