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Costco ZT computer failure

News, Technical ·Sunday March 15, 2009 @ 23:08 EDT (link)

I set up new Costco computer, installing Gentoo (from the AMD64 minimal install CD then network). Pretty smooth so far (downloading stage 3 now). Feels good to be overwriting a Vista installation. … And they gave me a bad SATA controller (ATI SB700/SB800: bugs 1 2 3). All I saw is that the VFS layer couldn't find the root partition (/dev/sda3) and couldn't find any alternates to suggest either. It wasn't until I compiled boot_delay support in that I could slow down the kernel messages enough to read the error and search for it. I'm not sure how the Gentoo install CD managed to access the disk; presumably it used an older or less specific driver. I tried two kernels (2.6.27-r8 and 2.6.28-r3). The box is going back to Costco. This was "ZT Systems Phenom II X4 920 2.8GHz Integrated ATI Radeon HD 3100" (item #384791), although no doubt a lot of ZT machines ship with this controller.

This is what I kept to cut and paste into my ssh window after I'd logged on with the minimal install CD, gotten the DHCP-assigned address with ifconfig, and started the ssh server (/etc/init.d/sshd start):

swapon /dev/sda2
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/gentoo
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot
mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev
chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash
env-update
source /etc/profile
export PS1="(chroot) $PS1"
grep -v rootfs /proc/mounts > /etc/mtab

Birthday card from my parents arrived today.

Books finished: The Grapes of Wrath.

DVDs finished: Friends: The Complete Fifth Season.