Gentoo Linux 2007.0, Intel DG965WH and IDE CD/DVD Drives
The following error showed up when trying to boot Gentoo Linux (from a Gentoo Linux 2007.0 Live CD) on a machine with an Intel DG965WH motherboard (Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor, Intel DG965WH motherboard, IDE DVD drive, SATA hard drive):
Attempting to mount media:- /dev/sda
No bootable medium found. Waiting for new devices...
Could not find CD to boot, something else needed!
The machine did not boot after this point. A little research about this problem led me to quite a few websites where it has been mentioned that booting up linux with the “all-generic-ide” option will fix this problem. A little more digging up led me to this Linux kernel patch posting from Alan Cox which explains what this option exactly does. It looks like the “all-generic-ide” option forces the generic IDE driver to claim any unknown IDE storage devices. The Intel DG965WH motherboard uses a Marvell IDE controller chip that does not seem to have any support yet in the Linux kernel 2.6.19 (that is in the Gentoo 2007.0 Live CD) and hence the fall back using the “all-generic-ide” option is required.
A less serious warning that showed up while booting from the same Gentoo Linux 2007.0 Live CD was:
PCI: BIOS Bug: MCFG area at f0000000 is not E820-reserved
PCI: Not using MMCONFIG.
The “pci=nommconf” option while booting up linux got rid of this warning (by explicitly disabling the MMCONFIG PCI configuration space access method). Apparently, the Intel DG965WH has a BIOS that exhibits a particular MMCONFIG problem. This Linux kernel related discussion thread has some more details.
Combining the above two options with the “nodhcp” option (for a static IP based server install) resulted in the following command line that worked like a charm with this particular configuration:
gentoo nodhcp all-generic-ide pci=nommconf
Tags: dg965wh, gentoo, ide, intel, linux
