Additional IDE & Pivot Errors

[raenius]

Hello, I need to put some additional drives in my computer. I purchased a Silicon Image IDE controller and I could install Mandriva 2006. When I rebooted the system came up with the error that it couldn't find the pivot root and a kernel-panic followed. So I took out the IDE controller and everything worked.. I have checked the bios but nothing really there that I can change. Well that worked anyway :)

 

So at the moment I can't add the IDE controller if I want to be able to boot. I also tried a Promise controller with the same results. I have three drives and a cdrom on the regular IDE controllers.

hda1 is my boot drive/partition.

 

 

 

So does anybody have any suggestions on what I can try?

 

My hardware:

New IDE controller: SIL0680ACl344 - F-ATA0680-133R-01 -AL01

 

MotherBoard is: K8T Neo2-Fir (K8T800 PRO)

Edited November 22, 2005 by raenius

[scarecrow]

Do you have any devices hooked on the controller?

It seems likely that your boot drive changes from /dev/hda to something different. The usual remedy is booting a liveCD, changing /etc/fstab entries to the new matching ones (they should be the same as the ones reported by the liveCD), mounting the root partition "somewhere', and running /sbin/lilo to save the changes before rebooting (the last step is not needed if you use grub to boot instead).

Edited November 22, 2005 by scarecrow

[pmpatrick]

This is really odd. I have a promise ultra 100 controller that I've used with linux for years with almost no problems(exception=mepis). Moving the drive from the controller card to the onboard card should have changed everything resulting in a unbootable system.

Post your ide congfiruration at the time you did the linux install, i.e. what drives are where.

If you initially installed without the controller card in and attempted to move your hard drive afterwards to the controller card, that won't work for linux without some significant changes to the config files.

[raenius]

I didn't move the drive. What I did was install linux onto hda on the primary controller on the motherboard. I installed with the controller in the computer. The install went by fine and everything worked. When I rebooted I got that error. I then went in using the repair option on the cd and I can access all the drives. Everytime I reboot though it fails. :( Then I thought maybe i'll install without the IDE controller and then add it afterwards but I get the same error. I have a similar setup on another computer and it worked fine. So I"m thinking it's just something quirky with this particular board/chipset combo? I tried the livecd thing and it show the same thing that the rescue boot shows. Which matches the fstab entries.

 

Here's my current setup i'll try and get stats with the ide controller.

 

/dev/hda5 / ext3 defaults 1 1

/dev/hda1 /boot ext3 defaults 1 2

/dev/hda10 /home ext3 defaults 1 2

/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0022,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0

none /proc proc defaults 0 0

/dev/hda7 /usr ext3 defaults 1 2

/dev/hda8 /var ext3 defaults 1 2

/dev/hdb1 /var/backup ext3 defaults 1 2

/dev/hda9 /var/log ext3 defaults 1 2

/dev/hdd1 /var/software ext3 defaults 1 2

pamconsole,exec,noauto,utf8,codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1,managed 0 0

/dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0

[pmpatrick]

Do you have any devices on the controller card when you try to boot up with the hard drive on hda? Most controller cards do not like optical drives to be connected to them. You are better off putting all opticals on the onboard ide ports and the hard drives on the controller card. The devices on the controller card should be listed starting with hde(primary, master), hdf(primary, slave), hdg(secondary, master) and hdh(secondary, slave). Also, you can get some anomolous results if you have nothing connected to the controller card. At least with the promise card I know that's true; mine won't boot with nothing connected to it.