Rebuilding Orsino

The rebuild was necessary because the hard disc had picked up a few errors and so my Linux installation was a bit stuffed. It was also rather out of date (I run Gentoo but hadn't updated for many months) so I thought I'd start from scratch.

The spec is

• VIA Mini ITX Eden motherboard (533MHz fanless CPU)
  
• 256 Mb RAM
  
• 120Gb 5400rpm hard disc
  
• Slimline TEAC DVD-ROM drive
  
• Basic case with external power supply (and disabled fans for lower noise)
  
• Dead cheap CM sound card with S/PDIF out as the onboard output will only do 48kHz digital out and so sounds rubbish
  

So I'll be posting what I did as I go.

Part 1: Create an installation disc

I like to use Gentoo so I downloaded the 2004.3 minimal LiveCD. You boot from this and do your system adminstration ready for installation and then download the tar files to do the real installation.

Part 2: Run badblocks on the hard drive

I didn't know about this utility before but it just scans your hard disc looking for read errors (or optionally it will write and read back) and outputting the bad block locations. If you tell it the blocksize you are using then it will output a file of block numbers that you can feed into your filesystem create call to get them mapped out. So first you partition, then create (or pretend to create) the filesystem to get the block size it will use, run badblocks, then recreate the file system with the bad block file.

Scanning 120Gb disc takes a very long time...

But after a few days I had my disk fresh and ready to go. I partitioned as follows

hda1: 128Mb boot partition
hda2: 10Gb root partition
hda3: 110Gb data partition

I don't bother with a swap partition as I find a swap file more flexible.

Part 3: Install Gentoo

This gets easier each time I do it, mostly because the documentation is getting better, it's so long between installs that I mostly forget whatever I did right the last time. This one went pretty smoothly until the last stage. I used the stage3 files, which is a Gentoo term for a precompiled base system (gcc, glibc, etc) rather than building everything from scratch, since 533Mhz isn't too speedy. Then when it came to the kernel I went straight for a 2.6 kernel since I've been running that elsewhere and it seems all the real problems have been ironed out.

So it all seemed fine until I rebooted and got stuck with an error on startup where it appeared to believe that my root filesystem was not cleanly unmounted and needed checking. Which would have been fine except that it then failed to remount it and dumped me to the maintenance prompt. I searched the forums and couldn't find any answers to this problem so eventually I installed a 2.4 kernel, which worked fine, and put it off for a while.

I eventually discovered that the problem appeared to be my swap file. If I comment out the swapline from fstab then the 2.6 kernel boots fine. It seems that it enables the swap file before checking the root filesystem and then can't do the remount. I'll work that one out eventually I guess.

So I now had a clean machine. What to do with it?