Cant get arch to boot on a eeepc 901

niadh · 2009-12-23 19:46:23

I have had arch installed on my desktop for a few weeks now and am using it more and more as a day to day system, so i went to install it on my netbook, and while i believe i have been successful in installation, I however am having problems with getting grub to actually boot the system.

I followed the netbook installation guide on the wiki and used an ext2 partition with no swap space, i manually partitioned the solid state drive, using the manual partition option in the install (as i have my main desktop computer and have no issues with). So bearing the partition scheme in mind I have only one partition on the drive intend for installation. I should mention I am installing arch to an external sd card as opposed to the ssd on board as the SSD is only 16 gigs and I wish to maximize /home space, the internal /home partition will be mapped in the fstab (I however have done this with two previous Linux systems on this SD card and know how to do that).

Below is a list of the drives installed on the netbook.

ptysd
sda
sda1
sda2
sda3
sda5
sdb
sdb1
sdb2
sdc
sdc1
sdc2
sdc3
sdc4
sdd
sdd1

Based on the assumption the drive i wish to install to has only one partition then sdd is the drive I believe holds the arch installation. This suggests a grub root device of hd 3,0. However this is where problems start occuring.

If I mount sdd1 nothing happens, it's not a valid block device, instead sdc1 is the partition (as revealed by systematically mounting each partition until the correct one had been found). This however implies the grub drive will be hd2,0, as is reflected by the grub file arch linux installed:

# (0) Arch Linux
title  Arch Linux
root   (hd2,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/132bba69-cefa-45a5-b2d9-45236bf17db4 ro
initrd /boot/kernel26.img

# (1) Arch Linux
title  Arch Linux Fallback
root   (hd2,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sdc1 ro
initrd /boot/kernel26-fallback.img

So I know 2,0 is not correct, but I know I can edit the boot lines from within a running grub, I translated ALL of the drives from sdXX to the grub format and tried them all, just to see which drives are recognised linux partition tables, interestingly hd1,0 is detected as a linux drive but the kernels cannot be detected. Sometimes I can get the system to start booting but the kernel panics attempting to wait for the sd card (root filesystem) to become available something about waiting 10 seconds for the device /dev/disk/by-uuid/<uuid>, the boot process bombs out at this point.

I know if the by-uuid boot method does not work i can replace it with a direct reference to /dev/sdXX, trying a combination of all the possible grub formatted drives/partitions and /dev/sdXX format has not resulted in a bootable system yet.

I am officially at the end of my knowledge of repairing linux, and would really appreciate some help getting arch to boot on this netbook. I know the SD card can be booted from as fedora 12 was on it previously and before that ubuntu netbook remix.

The SD card should be the default boot option however sometimes for a reason i have yet to discover it reverts to booting the sdd, i switch the boot order back to the sd card but i have still not yet made any progress, If someone can help me I'd be very grateful. If any more information is required, I will happily provide it.

skanky · 2010-01-21 21:00:38

Apologies if this is too late, I've just found this while browsing for a fix to a similar issue.

I have a 901 and installed to the SSD, and it's fine, no problems.
I have not installed to an SD card, but I have been installing to an external USB connected harrd drive (for use in a different laptop with fried graphics card). I don't know if the SD card reader us USB, if so then it will be the same as for installing to a USB drive and there is a wiki section on that (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ins … _a_USB_key).

To boot from anything other than SSD, I found I have to disable quick and quiet boots, and press "ESCAPE" when the BIOS appears. This give a pop-up list of drives from which I can try and boot.

When booting from the external USB, the grub needs to be set to use hd(0,0) as it is booting from that drive.

I am getting a failure to boot as it can't load the root file system. This seems to me to be because I forgot to add the usb hook to mkinitcpio.conf. I have tried the method at the wiki page to fix that, but so far no luck (so I've probably done something wrong).

I'm in two minds whether to put the drive into a separate laptop and finish the install (need to get sshd up and running), or try and fix the usb hook issue and keep it separate as the other laptop is my work one and I don't want to risk trashing more than I need to.

Anyway, this reply isn't about my problem, but hopefully that's a few hints as to what may be up with yours?

kasyaar · 2010-02-27 13:03:04

many thanks Skanky your hint about Esc key save some money that I've decide to spend for new usb drive

skanky · 2010-02-27 14:49:19

Nice one. Glad it helped.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-12-23 19:46:23

Cant get arch to boot on a eeepc 901

#2 2010-01-21 21:00:38

Re: Cant get arch to boot on a eeepc 901

#3 2010-02-27 13:03:04

Re: Cant get arch to boot on a eeepc 901

#4 2010-02-27 14:49:19

Re: Cant get arch to boot on a eeepc 901

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