Fedora Core 3, nForce3 & SATA - no drives!

hpx · #1 11th November 2004, 06:41 PM

This has been mentioned before, but there hasn't seemed to be any solutions that I've been able to find. I have an nForce3 motherboard (a Shuttle SN95G5), with a Seagate 200GB SATA hard drive. Fedora Core 2 installs fine, finds the SATA drive as hde, however in Fedora Core 3, sata_nv loads up and does not see any drives, so the install fails. (Something about drives timing out in dmesg). Has anyone been able to install FC3 on an nForce3 SATA drive? Any workarounds?

I tried installing a minimal FC2 install, however I have no idea if I can install from the FC3 CD without booting. Any ideas? Anyone??

/./. · #2 11th November 2004, 07:07 PM

Do you get a kernel panic after the installation reboot? If so, I am seeing the same thing. I used VMWare with virtual SCSI drives, which use the same driver as SATA drives...something is fishy here...

hpx · #3 11th November 2004, 07:39 PM

No -- Couldn't even get to the installer. Anaconda couldn't find the SATA to start the install on. sata_nv loaded, but couldn't find the drives. Whereas in FC2, sata_nv isn't required...

This is a known bug, however I'm sure someone found a workaround somehow...

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla....cgi?id=135302

Dog-One · #4 12th November 2004, 02:04 AM

Doing a network boot using the nForce3 onboard NIC (forcedeth) requires quirks as well. Wonder if the two bugs are an nVidia issue...

hvdmerwe · #5 17th November 2004, 04:11 PM

Also have this problem, installing fine on a SATA drive only to get a Kernel Panic on first boot (nForce3-VNF3-250 motherb) - can mount installation thou when doing a rescue boot from install CD - something wrong with the shipped initrd and/or kernel

hpx · #6 17th November 2004, 06:56 PM

2.6.9-1.667 changes SATA to a scsi model that doesn't work with nForce SATA. I fixed this by installing to an IDE drive, downloading the kernel source, changing SATA support to IDE (or something like that), built a new kernel and rebooted. Once I saw the SATA drive (as hde), I booted the FC2 linux rescue cd, copied all the files over to the SATA drive, and works great

tchung · #7 18th November 2004, 01:32 AM

This might be related.

Fedora Core 3 Update: kernel-2.6.9-1.678_FC3 is also causing "kernel panic"

http://fedoranews.org/blog/index.php?p=92

Thomas

lauterm · #8 20th November 2004, 01:17 PM

It must be. Booting the stock FC3 kernel (the 32 bit one or the 64 bit one) on my AMD64 gives the exact same error message. I added a comment to the bugzilla entry.

petard · #9 22nd November 2004, 11:18 AM

I have nforce 3 250 chipset on Gigabyte k8 triton series motherboard and an WD 160 GB SATA disc. Before I transfered to FC3 i used FC2. The nvidia chipset has a feature that maps the sata drives like IDE drives.

FC2 was detecting my HDD like hde and I was unable to boot.

When I installed FC 3 the setup loaded sata_nv by itself and detected the drive as sda. After the installation grub didn't want to load but I started the system of the rescue CD edited the /etc/grub.conf file and uncommented the line containg /dev/sda. Made grub-install and everything works fine. The hard drive makes better results than under Windows.

So I guess your problem is some bios setting.

lauterm · #10 22nd November 2004, 05:21 PM

petard, I went through the same stuff as you with FC2. This kernel panic is different. It loads the sata_nv driver, but the drive never responds.

waltmart · #11 22nd November 2004, 08:29 PM

I had the same problem as described here. After installing FC3 (on an old IDE disk) my SATA disk was gone.

I then entered BIOS and enabled SATA1/SATA2 DMA TRANSFER (integrated peripherals>ide function setup) and rebooted and the drive appeared again and worked as usual.

-------------------------------------------------------
MSI K8N Neo Platinum Edition S754 nForce3
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 2.0 GHz
Corsair TWINX1024-3200 DDR-DIMM 1024MB
Western Digital Caviar 160GB S-ATA
Western Digital Caviar 40GB IDE
MSI GeForce MX4000 128MB DDR

spinmind · #12 23rd November 2004, 07:44 AM

I 'm using Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro with the NForce3 chipset and Athlon64 3000+. There is a Silicon Image RAID controller (Sil 3512) on which there is a WD 80 Gb HD plugged in normal array mode (not raid).

I tried to install FC3 from the DVD but the DiskDruid didn't manage to load the driver for the raid controller, although it came to identify it correctly.

Any ideas that could help me?

delt0r · #13 23rd November 2004, 11:19 PM

I have the same motherboard and got it to install onto my SATA drive. I got it to work using the bios defalts and by pluging the drive into the Silicon Image RAID controller (SATA0 or SATA1 on this board). When it was on the nForce SATA it would time out every time (time out was at 30 secs). I tried every biios config option i could think of but no cigar. So i'm gunna stick with SATA0...

When i say work i mean install FC3 from the DVD onto the SATA segate 120g drive without a hitch. I have no ide drives.

dsmarty · #14 30th November 2004, 09:15 AM

I have a MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum and experience the exact same problems with sata_nv.

Time_outs, kernel panics etc. etc. etc.

Now I am looking for a controller that is fully supported under FC3, anyone a suggestion ?

lauterm · #15 30th November 2004, 11:33 AM

A small change to sata_nv.c and an rpm rebuild is all that is needed to fix this bug. See http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3352 and https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla....cgi?id=140367. Or you can just grab an rpm that I already fixed from http://www.wtamu.edu/~mlauterbach/ke....root.i686.rpm

Boot up in rescue mode. Do "chroot /mnt/sysimage". Then "wget http://www.wtamu.edu/~mlauterbach/kernel-2.6.9-1.681_FC3_SATA.root.i686.rpm". And finally, "rpm -ivh kernel-2.6.9-1.681_FC3_SATA.root.i686.rpm".