Asus M2V - Fedora Core 5 Installation

[Slammer64]

Has anyone gotten a successful installation on the ASUS M2V motherboard, the one that uses the damned Via 8237a chipset? If so, I would love to hear how you did it, I can't get it installed, doesn't recognize my sata drive at all. Please inform soonest.

[jcliburn]

I just bought an M2V for a gaming system for my kids. I was going to dual boot it with XP and Fedora, but there's no support for the board in the kernel yet. Looks like a patch has been supplied for the ide driver, but it's not in 2.6.18rc3-git2. A patch for the sata driver hasn't even been submitted. I'll see if I can gin up a patch and submit it.

Bottom line is, we won't be installing FC5 on our M2V systems.

[jcliburn]

Has anyone gotten a successful installation on the ASUS M2V motherboard, the one that uses the damned Via 8237a chipset? If so, I would love to hear how you did it, I can't get it installed, doesn't recognize my sata drive at all. Please inform soonest.

I've successfully installed FC5 on this motherboard. It's not for the faint of heart, but yum update is running on it right now, so it works. I have a single SATA drive (obviously, no RAID) installed. Let me know if you want the procedure. I'll have to send you a couple of kernel object files. Here are the prerequisites, just in case you REALLY think you want to do this. :)

PREREQUISITES:
1. A working system with a floppy drive to which you'll copy driver files.
2. The target (Asus M2V) system must also have a floppy drive *from* which you'll copy driver files.
3. The desired target system OS must be FC5.x86_64. Although this procedure should work for other Fedora versions that run a 2.6 kernel, it was written for FC5.x86_64.
4. The hard disk must be a non-RAID SATA drive. This procedure won't work for IDE/PATA drives, nor was it written for SATA RAID drives. I have a single SATA drive installed in my M2V system.
5. You must be willing to rebuild the sata_via module each time you update your kernel. This means you'll also need to download kernel source with each kernel update and rebuild/reinstall the module BEFORE you reboot following a kernel update.
6. If you want to use the onboard Attansic gigabit NIC, you'll need to rebuild that module, too, following each and every kernel update.

[jcliburn]

Looks like a patch has been supplied for the ide driver, but it's not in 2.6.18rc3-git2. A patch for the sata driver hasn't even been submitted. I'll see if I can gin up a patch and submit it.

Patch tested and submitted. http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-scsi&m=115500653325072&w=2