Had several more attempts using various methods at getting Gentoo installed on my old K6 board, including downloading the full LiveCD Installer - wouldn’t boot that either, but it’s almost certainly built for i686 not i586 - finally decided to resort tp plan B.

I’d treated myself to a new motherboard powered by an AMD XP 2800+ processor to play with MythTV - much fun. So let’s see if I can get Gentoo running on that, so quick hard drive swap last night, tried using the LiveCD Installer but it was taking far too long and I wasn’t comfortable it would work. And it did say in the instructions (yes, I do read them every now and then) you should be happy with doing minimal installs to use the installer.

So back to first principles this morning - reformat the partitions, follow the Quick Install guide (I almost know it by heart now) downloading i686 stage3.

It’s all going far too well, so not much surprose when, although it boots from the hard drive to more of a degree than the K6 (i.e. doesn’t reboot after a few secs) it did end up dying with a ‘Kernel panic’ - VFS: cannot open root device.

So back up a bit, reboot from CD, mount everything up again and have another look at the kernel config. SCott at work advised to not include SCSI support if it’s not needed, but I’m suspecting I needed to select something to get IDE working. A quick inspection of lspci shows ‘IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE] (rev 01)’ so hunting round in menuconfig I find something relevant, select it, rebuild, reboot, and …

BINGO! A barebones Gentoo box. Now, what was I going to do with it?