system hangs on boot

edk4971 · n00b Joined: 19 May 2005 Posts: 24

Hi all,
First some background, I have a gentoo system installed on a Pentium 2.4 desktop that I do all my work on. I have a small P233 tablet pc that I am trying to install gentoo on, having done it in the past I know it is incredibly slow, and taks days to compile everything I want on there, so I thought i would try a different route. I created a directory on my desktop, and chrooted into it and installed gentoo there, the only real deviation from the gentoo handbook being that /boot was a directory instead of a mount point). The CFLAGS, MAKEOPTS, USE flags were all set appropriate to the tablet machine, and the kernel was compiled to the tablets hardware. I stopped the install process after emerging grub (didn't run grub-install) Then I exited the chrooted environment and tarred the install directory and burned it to a CD. Then I booted the tablet off a set of slackware floppys, partitioned and formatted the hard drive, and mounted /mnt/gentoo and /mnt/gentoo/boot as appropriate. Then I copied the tarred install off the cd to /mnt/gentoo and untarred it. So what we have now is a full gentoo install on the hard drive of the tablet, compiled for the tablet. /boot is mounted on /dev/hda1 and contains the kernel files (system.map, kernel, .config, grub, etc) the / filesystem contains all the compiled binaries, and /swap is setup.

first problem. When I try to chroot /mnt/gentoo I get "Illegal Instruction"
Attempted workaroud: run /mnt/gentoo/sbin/grub, and install grub manually. Upon reboot it seems to work, the grub splash screen loads, and has the kernel I compiled listed as the only choice, as it should. All looks well.

Second Problem: Grub loads the kernel, all the kernel messages flash by, and the system hangs at "kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds" Not a kernel panic, the keyboard lights aren't blinking, just nothing happens, if i plug/unplug usb devices it responds accordingly, but thats it, nothing else happens.

Possible solutions? Here's a few that come to my mind.
1. I missed something in the kernel compile. Entirely possible, but I was careful. (leaning toward this as the most likely solution)
2. Building gentoo on another computer and copying it to the hard drive of the one you want doesn't work. Seems like it would though, thats why I tried this.
3. Grub didn't install properly (see problem 1). But since the grub splashscreen opens, it seem like it did. Grub has the proper entries for the system:
root (hd0,0)
kernel /kernel-2.6.12-gentoo-r6 root=/dev/hda2
*edit* I just noticed there was a space in the kernel line "kernel /kernel-2.6.12-gentoo-r6 root =/dev/hda2" However when I edit it (e at the grub prompt) and change it, it doesn't help, however the changes don't stay, the space is back after I reboot.

Suggestions?
Hard drive partition: (all fstab entries are correct)
/dev/hda1 - 64MB boot partition, formatted ext2
/dev/hda2 - 30GBish (not 100% sure) formatted ext3
/dev/hda3 - 256MB swap partition

ikaro · Advocate Joined: 14 Jul 2003 Posts: 2527 Location: Denmark

*edit*
huff long post ...
<removed previous advice>

i shouldnt have posted - i reallize now that the problem is related to a tablet?
I dont have any experience with such devices.

sorry.
_________________
linux: #232767

edk4971 · n00b Joined: 19 May 2005 Posts: 24

right... doesn't work, have tried on toms boot disk and slackware boot disks

sorry I know it is a long post, had a lot to say

edk4971 · n00b Joined: 19 May 2005 Posts: 24

attempt #2, going to just try installing from a floppy. I've done this in the past, but I think slackware has changed their boot disks. First problem was the slack disks don't have bzip support anymore, so downloaded the stage and portage files onto another box, bunzipped them and burned them to a cd, then I plugged my usb cd drive into the tablet and copied them onto the hard drive. problem solved. but I'm still getting the illegal instruction when I try to chroot, I KNOW i've done this before, is it possible the slack kernel is now too old to work with gentoo 2005.0? for that matter does kernel version matter for the purposes of chroot?