Help with installation on AMD64

[Mencius]

Hi All,

I am quite new to using linux and I am having trouble installing FC2 x86-64 on my AMD system. I have an Albatron K8X800 Pro II motherboard with Award BIOS and a 3400+ AMD Athlon 64 processor. I also have one 80GB seagate drive on UltraATA and another 160GB western digital on SATA, the SATA drive is in IDE mode. The 160GB drive is partitioned with swap, ext3, NTFS, and FAT32 partitions.

When the installation boots from the media it gets up to "hde: Max request size 1024KB" (this is my SATA drive) then I continually get a "Lost Interrupt" message. This goes on for some time after a while it brings up "DMA interrupt recovery" then that is followed by "lost interrupt" again. After some time my partitions on hde are detected and then the graphical installer launches. The install process seems to run ok. However during the installation the progress bar often freezes and does not move, strangely, when I move the mouse the progress starts up again. So during the installation I tend to randomly move the mouse around to keep it going.

After succesfully installing I was unable to boot. The process simply hangs after "decompressing linux". Also during the boot from the install media I, very briefly since it wizzes past rather fast, see a message saying: report your motherboard... etc.

Does anyone have some advice on these issues? I'd be grateful for any assistance.

Thanks

Additional System info:
Video Card: Radeon 9800Pro
Wireless: Netgear WG311v2 54Mb/s PCI
Optical: PIODATA DVD 108DX Burner
RAM: 1024MB PC3200

Boot priority:
1) CD
2) SATA
3) U-ATA

[Mencius]

I had to email Albatron about fixing the "K8 errata #93" error and I'm running a beta bios on here that fixed that, but for some reason when the kernel is trying to detect the drive on the SATA control it loses the interupt.

Well after a little reading I found this. Does that mean all hope is lost? Perhaps I'll pester Albatron too, or maybe try and clear some space on my IDE drive and install on that.

[Mencius]

I don't use SATA exclusively however, but boot using IDE (where all the system resides) and have a single SATA 300G as my data/video drive.

My motherboard Albatron K8T800 Pro II uses a VIA SATA driver chip, which I have set to "use like IDE" in my BIOS - no RAID enabled in BIOS. I cannot recall my BIOS revision at the moment.

Note that the sata-via driver gets "lost" after boot and therefore you cannot see your drive. So I added install sata-via in the modprobe.conf file and had to add a mount command in the local rcinit file. I cannot recall the exact entries off the top of my head but I can post the details if anyone wants.

My kernel is a built-from-source 2.6.8.1-521 with my own selection of modules and the K8 option (Athlon64), but no code changes.

I also found this but do not know how to implement these fixes mentioned. Can anyone refer me to some basic information explaining how to do this. And would I be correct in taking the implication of this post to be that I should boot from IDE?

[macemoneta]

Try booting with the kernel options noapic pci=usepirqmask. I had similar problems with my motherboard (an ASUS K8V SE Deluxe), and this solved the problem for me.

[Shadow Skill]

Off-topic what is U-ATA?

[JLF_65]

Fedora Core 2 and all other distros of a similar version all have a driver bug - the IDE driver tries to use the SATA even though the SATA driver is already loaded and using the SATA. This is what causes the lost int etc. messages. Fedora Core 3 fixes this problem. Fedora Core 3 will also be officially out Monday, so I suggest going with FC3 instead of FC2.

Note: I had the same problem on my K8T800 mobo. While turning off acpi in the kernel options works for installing FC2, it won't work on reboot unless you can turn off acpi in the BIOS. The bootloader has the same bug as the kernel in FC2, so you never even get to the stage where kernel options are used. As a result, FC2 can be installed, but won't boot.

To reiterate, install FC3.

[Mencius]

Thanks for the help.

I'll wait on FC3 then. U-ATA was just my crude abbreviation for ultra ATA, I suppose I could have said IDE just as easily and possibly more sensibly.

Thanks again.