FC4 installation SATA freeze

[InclininWirefrE]

hey...

My System Config:
- Asus K8N-DL server board (supporting Silicon Graphic 3114 & nVidia RAID coltrollers)
- Dual-Opteron 246
- 2x512 MB Corsair ECC reg. RAM

Problem:
- Installation freezes at the "Loading SCSI driver. Loading sata_nv driver..." message on 3 different Linux distros including FC4.

I have the drivers copied on a floppy disk from the motherboard's accompanying CD...How can i get FC4 to use these & successfully complete installation?

Pls advise...thx in anticipation!


P.S.: Both normal installation and 'noprobe' options lead to the above mentioned screen.

[canis_lupus]

Hi,

My system:
Asus K8N-DL mother board
(2) opteron 244 processors
HDs SATA (2 x 120 GB)
Silicon Image 3114R controller
Gforce 256 MB
1 GB DDR

I'm having the same problem, I got this error when I put the HDs on the SATA connectors.

Before this I had connected my HDs on the Sata Raid controller (Sil3114) but on boot I always got GRUB crash with the error 17.

Need help too.

[overule]

I had the same problem. what i did was, i use linux nousb option to fix it.

[canis_lupus]

It doesn't work. Another sugestion? Thx.

[daneel971]

Take a look here - it's gentoo but seems interesting

http://gentoo-wiki.com/ASUS_K8N-DL_dual_Opteron_motherboard

[InclininWirefrE]

perhaps a clue at http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Fedora/2004-01/1782.html...

"The RAID drivers are not loaded correctly by the Red Hat installer after following expert steps necessary to load disk drivers from a diskette prior to installation. After inserting the driver disk and selecting the appropriate driver, the Red Hat installer reports "no hard drives have been found" although the machine's hard drives have been properly installed and configured. RAID 1 configurations with 2 ATA/EIDE and also with 2 SATA150 drives have been tested."

how to get into the expert mode, any1?

[InclininWirefrE]

hi!

turns out nv_sata raid controller is not supported by FC4 yet...just changed to Sil and all worked out sweet!

[canis_lupus]

I've been trying both alternatives. In fact when I connected the HDs on Sil I got the best resuslts but it didn't work too. I installed XP and FC4 sucessfully but on boot grub crashes with error 17, so I entered with "linux rescue" and tryed to fix grub but it doesn't work too. It seems that Bios doesn't recognize the HDs. I'm very confusing!

[sej7278]

Yeah the SIL 3114 works a treat for me in FC4. The Intel and Nvidia controllers are not so well supported it seems -you could just disable them if you can't get past the install.

The only thing I found was the FC4 doesn't seem to support non-ext3 installs, well you get through an xfs/jfs install, then it won't boot. So I used ext3 during install and then converted to JFS after first boot.

Oh and the "RAID" functionality doesn't work for any motherboard controllers as they're not really hardware RAID.

[InclininWirefrE]

about the RAID functionality not being hardware-based and, therefore, not working...well, not entirely true...

installing FC4 was the smoothest ride once i learnt abt nv_sata not being supported and switched to sil...even did some C programming for a couple of days...all worked smooth!

however, today I came and booted and on reaching GRUB the cursor keeps blinking forever...can't load XP either since I dont reach the 'choose OS to load' screen...

any ideas wud b appreciated.

[sej7278]

why's it not entirely true? looks like it fscked up your system....

it's not hardware raid, so it won't work under linux. you can use linux' own soft raid, it's just as good as 'bios raid'.

and sata is different from raid if that's what you mean - you can get ide raid and scsi raid.

[canis_lupus]

Finally I could install FC4.

HDs aren't connected on NVidia SATA but on Sil3114 controller. In Bios I didn't disable NVidia SATA and disable ACPI APIC support. Drives must be configured on concatenated mode.

Because the FC4 install freezes on a "white screen" due to the video card (GeForce 6200) I had to enter with "linux text".

In the boot FC4 froze when loading the graphical interface so I switched to runlevel 3, downloaded and installed the NVidia driver for linux but the system crashed again.

After 3 weeks and tired of that stuff I change to Debian Sarge and the system is running smooth.

This mobo really sucks! And like another user said, it's a nightmare for linux users and is my last mobo from Asus.

Good luck!

[mkswan]

Hello all,
I saw your posts and it looks like you sorted out most of the problems. I wanted to ask if anyone sorted out the usb situation. I get past the initial /sbin/loader hang by typing linux nousb (after I swapped the sata drive plug from the nv controller to the sil on the mboard) It now gets to the cd checking step but because I have a usb mouse and a usb keyboard I can't do anything!!;) Do I really have to sort out an old ps2 keyboard and mouse?? Is it simply necessary to get FC4 installed and then its possible to get usb working by a kernel recompile or something like that?
Thanks for any help.