Fedora 12 Install Hangs Detecting Storage

[publius21]

I've been trying to install Fedora 12 on my "new" system. I got a new motherboard, an ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO, with a Phenom II x4 CPU. I had some old IDE hard drives on the old mo/bo, but the new one didn't have but one IDE port, the rest were SATA, and so I used an old Adaptec 1200A IDE RAID card, which is based on the HPT 370 chipset. This all works fine with Windows XP and 7, both 32-bit and x64 versions.

Then I tried to install Fedora 12 x64 (the 32-bit version has the same problem I later discovered). First, I had to use the basic video driver setup option, or use "nomodeset", but the installer always hangs on the "Detecting Storage Devices" step. It will just there with the mouse pointer in the "wait" mode, and then will lock up hard after 10 minutes or so.

I don't know much about Linux, so bear with me, but I figured out to Ctrl-Alt-F4 and find some error/status messages.

It is complaining about ATA10.1 That seems to be the number it has given to the second port on the HPT card, on which there are two disk drives. It reports a lost interrupt, then some about error on a command, then reports an invalid CHS sector 0.

Now, Fedora 11 will install fine, but the upgrade to the lastest kernel for that will hang as well.

Are there any options to turn off this particular disk or anything? I tried ide10=noprobe, but that didn't work. I assume it's part of the sd<x> ata drivers and not the old hd<x> ide drivers.

Thanks for any help.

-Richard

[steelaworkn]

You have a nice board. That's what I want for my next birthday. :D

If it were mine, I would remove the RAID card and use Linux Raid. Your board is supposed to support RAID:

SB710 Chipset
1 xUltraDMA 133/100/66 for up to 2 PATA devices
5 xSATA 3 Gb/s ports Support RAID 0,1,10,JBOD
1 x eSATA 3Gb/s port

[publius21]

No, no -- the reason I'm using the raid card is not for RAID, but to get the extra EIDE ports I need. :) The ASUS board does have 6 SATA ports, and I'm using one. I just wanted to keep using my old EIDE hard drives (total of 4), and get the good out of them. The ASUS board has only one EIDE port, and I needed that for my two DVD drives. So I needed two more EIDE ports and the card was the way to get that.

Crazy as it is, I got the Fedora 12 install to run by using the "noefi" kernel parameter. I tried that one on a lark. I remembered an install on another machine hung up because it was getting confused thinking a disk had a GPT partition table when it didn't. I don't know if that was the case here, but the "noefi" option let it go through.

Now, to see if the install will actually boot itself. :)

[publius21]

No luck. I got the install to work, but the installation won't boot. It gets through the progress bar at the bottom of the screen with "Fedora 12" to the right, the stops with some message about "audit" something or another. I can ctrl-alt-F2 to a terminal and login as root, but things are working right there. Yum for example crashes with a segfault.

I tried the Fedora 12 Live CD and it will boot (with nomodeset), but the install to disk option there just hangs at "detecting devices".

So no luck at all.


-Richard