My hard disk crashed; that's not a big deal as I make backups frequently. The problem is I didn't have any rescue disk to get to my backup.
I had to install Windows to get to the Internet, download and burn a Gentoo CD. This is embarrassing when I bragged a while back that I got rid of Windows!
Next my backup was on a firewire device, and it was a headache to get
to. I booted the Gentoo CD with gentoo dofirewire. I then typed the
following command to get to my external drive.
modprobe sbp2 spb2_serialize_io=1 echo "scsi add-single-device 0 0 0" > /proc/scsi/scsi
My drive needs the spb2_serialize_io set to 1 or it won't work.
I have learned that it's not enough to make backup. I need to make a rescue CD so that I don't waste time recovering my system.