[Gllug] Gentoo & Booting from SATA disk

[Dennis Furey]

I recently ran into the same problem trying to install Debian on a
spanking new Dell precision 4something. If installing linux were a
game, this would qualify you to move up a level. Here are a few
gotchas that may or may not be relevant to you:

* the drivers/aic7xxx tree in the kernel source is not up to date even
in some of the 2.6 series kernels, and that's what you need for sata
drives to work. Go to the author's web page (I forgot where it is),
download the aic7xxx driver source tarball, and replace it in your
kernel tree before compiling. It may seem inconvenient, but you could
find that nothing works until you do.

* you will need to build custom installation media with this driver
compiled into the kernel. I can't speak for other distros but the
Debian installation instructions will walk you through it. Of course,
you need to use an already working linux box for this part.

* After you go to the trouble of making a custom kernel and putting it
on the boot floppy, watch out for the installer downloading a standard
kernel regardless, as Debian does, which will leave you with an
unbootable system. Let's hope your distro either doesn't do that or
lets you escape to a shell during the installation process. In the
latter case, take a similarly configured custom kernel package that
you've previously prepared on a floppy disk (aside from the boot
floppy), and install it onto the target system just prior to the
reboot. You'll need to poke around for the mount point of the root
filesystem hierarchy on the target system, which is different from
that of the ramdisk used during installation, and might be under
/mnt/target or something like that. Mount the floppy at a point under
the target hierarchy and use chroot /mnt/target dpkg -i
/floppy/kernel-image-bla-bla-bla.deb or whatever command your distro
requires.

* You deserve to move up to an even higher level if the disk has an
ntfs filesystem on it and you want to set it up for dual booting. In
that case, you'll need to make your own custom partition editor boot
floppies and use the ntfs tools to shrink the windows partition.

* Beware of web pages that give incorrect advice.

* A recent thread on this list mentioned something about workarounds
for poor performance of sata drives with linux. I didn't understand
the whole thing and you should confer with someone who does.

If you email me off list, I might be able to find my boot floppy
images and kernel configuration files to send to you.

Dennis
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug