Something went haywire with my 8 or 9 year old dual Opteron ~amd64 system last
night. I may have a bricked system. I haven't given up yet, but I may have to
buy a replacement system. I have external USB drive backups, but the only
other computer I have right now is an old Mac laptop which can't read Linux LVM
partitions.
Questions:
1. I don't remember, and can't look up, the make.conf processor flags I
emerge with. But it is dual Opterons, and ~amd64. How compatible could that
be with modern Intel CPUs? I know Intel adopted the extra registers of the
AMD64 instruction set, but are there other differences which would prevent an
Opteron system from running as is under an Intel processor? Maybe AMD still
sells Opterons, and I will be stuck with building a system.
2. Is it feasible to buy some commodity box, like from Dell, with an Intel
processor, and plug in my two SATA SSD drives and get a console boot? I don't
give a fig right now about any GUI interface, and even Internet is not the
problem. If it will boot and run emerges, I can import the source files for X
and Ethernet and other peripherals via USB stick. But SATA drivers ...
3. My kernels always have just about every driver compiled in as modules,
an old habit from when I used to swap in PCI cards like crazy. I don't
remember now how many SATA drivers are built in and how many are modules; if
the commodity box needs SATA drivers which aren't built in, that could get
tricky. Are there boot command line options to preload certain modules? Might
not do me any good. I think I could scrape by with USB modules, but not SATA.
For the curious, here is wat happened. When I left off last night, the USB
keyboard was only recognized when I unplugged all other USB devices, and the
system hung at the grub point, with a blank screen.
A reboot failed because it couldn't find the root=/dev/sde drive. But the
USB keyboard was working because I used it in grub to select a new 3.7.0 kernel
(had been running 3.6.8).
A second reboot ignored the USB keyboard and generated an ATA error I had
never seen before for every ATA drive and some I don't have, all the way up to
ATA13 before I rebooted it again. I haven't got it to boot even this far
since, so I can't regenerate that error. There was a 5 second or so delay
between these errors, making me think the ATAnn designator might not be
different drives, just retries.
It booted a rescue DVD, but without the keyboard it was kind of pointless,
and it hung after showing two lines which I believe are unrelated other than a
place marker (generating xxx key, generating RSA key).
The keyboard wasn't even recognized by the BIOS. I finally disconnected
every USB device, all the ubs, and then the keyboard worked.
But when I left it last night, it wouldn't even bring up the grub screen.
All the BIOS screens show the usual disk drives.
The system was working perfectly fine before all hell broke loose. The
keyboard was recognized during grub the first time, but after that only if all
other USB devices were disconnected. The disk drives acted funny during the
boot, first with the unknown root- device error, then with the funky ATA
errors, and finally with not even bringing up grub.
I will try some more desperate tricks today, like reconnecting the USB pile to
see if it at least boots the disks again - is my choice between disks and
keyboard? I will find out. My best guess right now is that booting 3.7.0 is
what clobbered things; whether I added a option which loaded bad firmware, or
3.7.0 is broken, I have no idea. It could well be something unrelated to
3.7.0. My goal for today is to try to get keyboard and disk working, then boot
with 3.6.8.
--
Felix Finch, a la mode
