ArchLinux does not recognize IDE hard drives

schmmd · 2008-03-28 04:29:37

I recently bought a new Gigabyte motherboard (GA-EP35-DS3P). At the BIOS level, everything is OK. The motherboard detects my hard drive and correctly reports its size, etc. It places it at IDE Channel 4 Master. However, when I boot Arch, no drives are recognized and I am taken to the recovery shell.

I tried another distribution (Linux Mint) and everything worked fine. The drives were identified as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. They could be mounted and read just fine. I hope I don't need to abandon Arch!

brebs · 2008-03-28 04:38:30

It sounds like the other distro has set up grub correctly. That's all. Look at its grub setup, and copy it in Arch. Files involved:

/boot/grub/menu.lst
/boot/grub/device.map

schmmd · 2008-03-28 04:46:16

Grub is set up correctly, I believe. In the recovery shell, if I 'echo * /dev/' I get:

console, core, fd, full, kmem, kmsg, loop#, mem, mice, mouse0, null, port, psaux, ptmx, ram#, random, snapshot, stderr, stdin, stdout, tty#, urandom, vcs, vcs1, vcsa, vsa1, zero

Note that the pound signs stand for numbers. I tried re-installing Arch from CD as well, and it failed at the partitioning step because it could not detect any drives.

ph0tios · 2008-03-28 05:08:36

schmmd wrote:

Grub is set up correctly, I believe. In the recovery shell, if I 'echo * /dev/' I get:
console, core, fd, full, kmem, kmsg, loop#, mem, mice, mouse0, null, port, psaux, ptmx, ram#, random, snapshot, stderr, stdin, stdout, tty#, urandom, vcs, vcs1, vcsa, vsa1, zero
Note that the pound signs stand for numbers. I tried re-installing Arch from CD as well, and it failed at the partitioning step because it could not detect any drives.

That has happened to me before during an install, but strangely I'll reboot and it randomly detects the drive.

schmmd · 2008-03-28 06:34:05

;-( How is it possible that grub loads from the hard drive but then linux cannot find the hard drive?

jbromley · 2008-03-28 06:55:19

GRUB uses the BIOS to access the disk since when you boot, since there is no OS loaded. This is why GRUB can work but Linux can't find the hard drive Only once Linux boots will the /dev/sd* devices come into being.

Anyway, do you get any error or warning messages when you are booting before you are dropped into the recovery shell? You say you "boot" Arch, so I take this to mean you selected Arch from the GRUB boot menu, right? My first guess is that perhaps you need to regenerate your initcpio because it doesn't contain the correct drivers for your new equipment. Perhaps try running mkinitcpio to regenerate the initcpio files. If that alone doesn't work you may have to tweak your mkinitcpio.conf file to include the correct drivers.

Good luck,
j

brebs · 2008-03-28 07:00:03

See grub guide and its many threads.

schmmd · 2008-03-28 07:59:22

jbromley wrote:

GRUB uses the BIOS to access the disk since when you boot, since there is no OS loaded. This is why GRUB can work but Linux can't find the hard drive Only once Linux boots will the /dev/sd* devices come into being.
Anyway, do you get any error or warning messages when you are booting before you are dropped into the recovery shell? You say you "boot" Arch, so I take this to mean you selected Arch from the GRUB boot menu, right? My first guess is that perhaps you need to regenerate your initcpio because it doesn't contain the correct drivers for your new equipment. Perhaps try running mkinitcpio to regenerate the initcpio files. If that alone doesn't work you may have to tweak your mkinitcpio.conf file to include the correct drivers.
Good luck,
j

The error message I get is:

"Attempting to create root device '/dev/sda6' ERROR: Failed to parse block device name for '/dev/sda6' unknown ERROR: root fs cannot be detected.  Try using the rootfstype= kernel parameter.

Root device '/dev/sda6' doesn't exist, attempting to create it
ERROR: Failed to parse block device name for '/dev/sda6'
ERROR: Unable to create/detect root device '/dev/sda6'
Dropping to a recovery shell... type 'exit' to reboot
NOTE: klibc contains no 'ls' binary, use 'echo *' instead
...

I think the problem is exactly as you diagnosed. How would you recommend running mkinitcpio as I cannot boot Arch? I can boot into another distro and do a chroot to the Arch installation, but I don't think this would work right...

jbromley · 2008-03-28 17:13:01

According to your error message, Arch doesn't seem to recognize the file system on your root drive. It could be that "filesystems" is not in your mkinitcpio hooks (unlikely unless you've done your own mkinitcpio.conf tweaking) or there is a GRUB configuration problem. Post your GRUB menu.lst, and the your hard drive configuration (fdisk -l /dev/sd{a,b}) from your Ubuntu setup and we can see exactly what the problem is. Also, what filesystem is your root drive?

With respect to how to rerun mkinitcpio, my guess would be that you would have to boot from an Arch install CD and then instead of running "arch setup" try to boot your Arch. I don't remember the exact command to do this, but it will tell you when you boot the Arch install CD. You mentioned you couldn't reinstall Arch from CD. If you continue to have this problem, then I'm not sure what the problem could be. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Regards,
j

phrakture · 2008-03-28 19:48:16

Please try the fallback image "kernel26-fallback.img". It contains all possible modules... if that doesn't work, we have a bigger problem. My guess is the generated initcpio image is missing your actual module.

schmmd · 2008-03-29 19:24:51

The problem did have to do with the images, I believe, but the fallback did not work either. Also, when I ran mkinitcpio it did not fix the problem. However, a reinstall cleared up the issue (and was probably a good idea as my last install was a mess). Thank you for all your help!

nahoj · 2008-04-02 08:59:12

I got the same problem when updating the kernel. My installation was done like this:

/dev/sda3 /boot ext2
/dev/sda5 swap
/dev/sda6 / reiserfs
/dev/sdb1 /home reiserfs

I used grub as boot-manager,installed on mbr at sda

when I rebooted after update I recieved exactly the same error message as shmmd

When I use the cd to boot I can boot into the installation:

arch root=/dev/sda6

but then I can not mount /boot. Error message says:
unknown filesystem ext2

The result is i can not edit the grub menu.lst and nothing happens with the installed boot manager.

I am very confused! Since this is my work-computer i even had to boot into windows vista (/dev/sda1) in order to be able to work and to browse here! Very annoying!

I don't like to reinstall everything since the first install was done as late as february and I have tweaked everything to work well now...

TheGrudge · 2008-04-02 11:39:51

Same here... updated my laptop, everything is fine. Now I updated my desktop PC, arch is not booting anymore.
I booted from CD and mounted all my aprtitions, nothing wrong here.
I mounted (--bind) dev, sys and proc and chrooted into my installation. Everything is fine.
When I look into /boot, I can see that my fallback-image was deleted (like on my laptop) aswell as the kconfig file. Both have an extension ".pacsave" applied to it, I guess it happened during the last kernel update.
I ran mkinitcpio, everything is fine. But I missed the IDE hook so I enabled it again, ran mkinitcpio and saved the image to /boot/kernel26.img.
Reboot - Nothing, same error as schmmd is describing.
I changed kernel parameters from /dev/hda2 to /dev/sda2... nothing.
I added rootdelay=10 to the kernel parameters... nothing.
I don't know what happened. Both partitions are EXT3 filesystems, why are they not recognized?

TheGrudge · 2008-04-02 11:49:05

This is so strange... now it is booting again, BUT I have to switch all devices from /dev/hdx to /dev/sdx.... hmm...

Last edited by TheGrudge (2008-04-02 11:49:19)

mancino · 2008-04-02 13:14:41

look at your mkinitcpio.conf i insert ide_disk in modules and ide in hooks and after reinstall kernel26 with arch cd
or mkinitcpio etc. etc
my pc work again

nahoj · 2008-04-02 20:48:39

THANK YOU mancino!

I followed your advice and in 5 min the computer is running again!

For others that - like me - have never done this before I write what I did:
************************
Boot with cd and give the command
arch root=/dev/sda6

Then I get in touch with my system in console. The problem is I run kernel2.6.22 and my update is to kernel 2.6.24

Then I edit the file /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and in modules I add 'ide_disk reiserfs'

In hooks i add 'ide'

Then I start

mkinitcpio -k 2.6.24-ARCH -g IMAGE

Then I copy this:

cp IMAGE /boot/kernel26.img

Then I can reboot and everything works again!

**************************************

Thanks a lot for the help!

Last edited by nahoj (2008-04-02 20:49:03)

SenorSnor · 2008-04-06 19:16:00

I had the same problem .. fixed it so:
1) in the grub menu, i edited the startup line, replaced something like "root=/dev/hda2" to "root=/dev/sda2", then at least i could boot again
2) edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to reflect the change above
3) edit /etc/fstab, replace all /dev/hd... with /dev/sd.....

Arch Linux

#1 2008-03-28 04:29:37

ArchLinux does not recognize IDE hard drives

#2 2008-03-28 04:38:30

Re: ArchLinux does not recognize IDE hard drives

#3 2008-03-28 04:46:16

Re: ArchLinux does not recognize IDE hard drives

#4 2008-03-28 05:08:36

Re: ArchLinux does not recognize IDE hard drives

#5 2008-03-28 06:34:05

Re: ArchLinux does not recognize IDE hard drives

#6 2008-03-28 06:55:19

Re: ArchLinux does not recognize IDE hard drives

#7 2008-03-28 07:00:03

Re: ArchLinux does not recognize IDE hard drives

#8 2008-03-28 07:59:22

Re: ArchLinux does not recognize IDE hard drives

#9 2008-03-28 17:13:01

Re: ArchLinux does not recognize IDE hard drives

#10 2008-03-28 19:48:16

Re: ArchLinux does not recognize IDE hard drives

#11 2008-03-29 19:24:51

Re: ArchLinux does not recognize IDE hard drives

#12 2008-04-02 08:59:12

Re: ArchLinux does not recognize IDE hard drives

#13 2008-04-02 11:39:51

Re: ArchLinux does not recognize IDE hard drives

#14 2008-04-02 11:49:05

Re: ArchLinux does not recognize IDE hard drives

#15 2008-04-02 13:14:41

Re: ArchLinux does not recognize IDE hard drives

#16 2008-04-02 20:48:39

Re: ArchLinux does not recognize IDE hard drives

#17 2008-04-06 19:16:00

Re: ArchLinux does not recognize IDE hard drives

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