[plug] SATA boot problem

[Daniel Pittman]

Jim Householder <nofixed at westnet.com.au> writes:
> Daniel Pittman wrote:
>> Jim Householder <nofixed at westnet.com.au> writes:
>>
>>> I have just bought a 500GB SATA Seagate Barracuda drive, and have built a
>>> kernel on it with all the SATA options I could find built-in (not modules).
>>>
>>> When I boot from the drive it gets as far as trying to mount / and panics.
>>> A list of partitions available does not show the SATA drive, event though
>>> the code that aborted was executed from it.

I see further down that the issue was identified and resolved; on that basis
let me talk further about the couple of bits that are still interesting:

>> Do you mean "was executed from it" in the sense of "GRUB loaded the initrd
>> and kernel from it?"
>
> yes, but no initrd - just vmlinuz

*nod*  You might find that using an initrd gives you more scope to debug boot
problems in future; certainly, I find that having a full shell and a decent
set of debugging tools on hand when the root file system fails to mount is
very valuable.

Having the fsck for your filesystem is also nice, for those times that it does
get unhappy.  Not that this is common these days, but way back when it used to
be a life saver.

[...]

>> Now, one last question: why are you building a custom kernel rather that using
>> the distribution option?  The distribution will almost certainly have the
>> right drivers available and configured sensibly, so you can avoid this problem
>> of doing it yourself entirely...
>
> I'm using gentoo, and I do not want the kitchen sink!

...and that raises the question: why not?

I suppose, given you do note that you are not using an initramfs or initrd,
that having made that choice probably forces your hand with regard building in
drivers to the image.  Is that the reason?

Regards,
        Daniel