SATA drives not recognized, P965 chipset problem?

RocketRay · #1 4th January 2007, 04:28 PM

For Xmas I decided to give myself a new system, so I went down to evil Fry's and got an Intel E6600/ECS P965-A mobo combo and proceeded to set it up. My previous system booted from an IDE HD and then ran from SATAs (due to Windoze XP hassles), but this one is going to only be SATA.

When I try to boot from the HD, my previous install of GRUB works and it starts loading, but because the devices are different it hangs. No problem, I was planning on installing fresh anyway. But when I boot up an FC6 DVD, it takes a LONG time to get past the aic7xxx driver, then when it's finally up into anaconda it gets to HD partitioning and says there are no drives in the system. Booting into rescue shows no "sata" anywhere in dmesg.

My first thought is there's no SATA driver in the kernel for this chipset, but from what I understand this chipset isn't that new.

One curiousity: when the m/b is POSTing there's an IDE scan where the HDs show up. In my previous system (VIA chipset) there was a SATA probe.

Any ideas?

When I'm home I'll get a copy of dmesg & lspci output and post again.

kinematic · #2 4th January 2007, 04:48 PM

i would suggest to boot a live cd(knoppix)and see if it recognizes all your drives and take a look at the knoppix fstab if it does see them.
then modify grub and fstab accordingly and boot the fedora that's on the ide drive(it's still on there right?)to see if an installed fedora sees them.

RocketRay · #3 4th January 2007, 05:09 PM

I tried a Knoppix 4.0 DVD I had (will get a 5.0 later) and the only thing it did was pop up the two Tuxes. An Ubuntu Edgy Eft DVD from December 2006 hung after choosing "install or run live CD".

Talked with a guy here at work, he said another guy here but on vacation ran into this problem in FC6 cause he didn't have his drives in order on the SATA controllers. Seems FC6 wants them on 1,2,3, etc, you can't do 1,3,5 for example. This cheap ECS m/b has 8 SATA controllers, but only 5 of them have connectors. When it POSTS, it says the first drive is on 0 Master, but then 0 Slave, 1 Master & Slave are empty. Then 2 Master & Slave have drives.

brahms · #4 4th January 2007, 05:34 PM

Have you tried using the 'all-generic-ide' kernel parameter? If the BIOS is seeing the drives then this could work. There are SATA changes in kernel 2.6.19 which might be relevant also.

RocketRay · #5 5th January 2007, 02:03 AM

Got it figured out (at least I've got FC6 installer going). I needed to add "irqpoll" to the kernel parameters. Now it sees /dev/sda just fine. I'll hook up the other two drives later, since this thing goes SATA 1,3,5,6,7.

RocketRay · #6 5th January 2007, 03:11 AM

Well, not all figured out. Attaching dmesg & lspci output in case someone recognizes something. I'm thinking this ECS m/b is a POS. SATA controllers not implemented, it hasn't done networking yet, etc.

Enigma 2100 · #7 5th January 2007, 04:47 PM

Let me try and understand. You bought a new mobo and cpu and installed that onto the computer then tried to boot your old Linux using the new hardware?

As you are thinking about a fresh install just disconnect all hard drives except the one you want to install Linux to. Then reinstall. Repost with results.

brahms · #8 5th January 2007, 05:28 PM

Having looked through your dmesg, I'm seeing similar output to that which I had with my Abit AB9 965. I would highly recommend instailling the 2.6.19 kernel from the development repo which solved most my problems. Just make sure your fstab is mounting either by label or LVM as it might assign the device nodes differently.

Enigma 2100 - I think that is exactly what he has done, correct me if I'm wrong, RocketRay.

RocketRay · #9 5th January 2007, 05:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by brahms

Having looked through your dmesg, I'm seeing similar output to that which I had with my Abit AB9 965. I would highly recommend instailling the 2.6.19 kernel from the development repo which solved most my problems. Just make sure your fstab is mounting either by label or LVM as it might assign the device nodes differently.

Enigma 2100 - I think that is exactly what he has done, correct me if I'm wrong, RocketRay.

Yes, I disconnected all but one HD and then did a fresh install. I reconnected the other drives and they are recognized correctly (sda, sdb, sdc). I got X running correctly by manually installing the NVidia driver I had previously downloaded from NVidia's site.

I'll get the 2.6.19 dev kernel and install when I get home. Hopefully that'll fix my other main problem, no Ethernet (!).

RocketRay · #10 6th January 2007, 02:33 PM

OK, got 2.6.19 installed (had to force it) and the kernel complains "your timesource seems to be unstable or is hogging interupts". It gets past that and then in the "Interactive" steps it freezes right after "Starting cpuspeed [OK]".

I'm gonna try installing XP (yuck), then when that fails I'll throw in the towel and buy an NVidia based m/b, and NOT ECS.

brahms · #11 6th January 2007, 03:08 PM

1. Did you use 'irqpoll' again?
2. What is your ethernet chipset?

RocketRay · #12 6th January 2007, 06:58 PM

Windoze install failed right away, as expected.

I have both irqpoll and all-generic-ide in grub.conf. Now I don't have sda, sdb, sdc, I have hda etc. I'm still getting that IDE problem. Says "The drive appears to be confused. Trying to recover by ending request".

The ethernet is whatever comes with the P965 chipset, I suppose.

Enigma 2100 · #13 6th January 2007, 10:00 PM

What happened with the Windows install? The reason I ask is it should have installed without any errors. If it failed due to a hardware problem then there might be something fundamentally wrong with your hardware.

RocketRay · #14 7th January 2007, 04:04 AM

Yeah, there is something fundamentally wrong. One of the SIMMs is bad. That's probably been the cause of all of this.

Also the ECS m/b has an unsupported Ethernet chipset. :P

Enigma 2100 · #15 7th January 2007, 12:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RocketRay

Yeah, there is something fundamentally wrong. One of the SIMMs is bad. That's probably been the cause of all of this.

Yep, that'll do it.