Confirmed SATA Installs

[SmyTTor]

I would like to see if anyone has been able to do a FC2 install on an Athlon64 motherboard using SATA exclusively.

Has anyone been able to get an install through on an Abit KV8-MAX3 or ASUS K8V Deluxe, on either of the onboard SATA chipsets?

I can pretty much validate that the Foxconn 755a01 is NOT a viable board for any install, though I did get FC2 to install on the Silicon Image 3112 chipset (the SiS964 chipset is a no go). The reason that this motherboard should be avoided is the extremely poor USB implementation (how can you mess up USB?) that runs about %50 CPU usage when a single USB device is in use (around %60 in Windows XP) and with multiple USB devices working, like a KB, mouse, printer, and digital camera, the overall strain is so bad there is missed keystrokes, cursor positioning is lost, and print spooling or image copying fails. There is also abnormally high CPU usage on any HD access. When I was working on a logo and the mouse would lose position during a stroke I had to undo and restart the whole line over. In WinXP there were abundant quirks and crashes (more than usual). I shut down the system in disgust and switched back to my Athlon 2800 system and am considering the two motherboards above, or any that have a supported SATA chipset in FC2 and a verified install.

[mhec]

Subject says it all, I'll let you know the results.

[Bana]

Chaintech ZNF3-150 works fine with a silicon image 3114 SATA raid chip. Sound even works (after many weeks of waiting).

[SmyTTor]

Should have an Asus K8V SE Deluxe Monday, Tuesday by latest. I'm going to try an installs off both the SATA chipsets and let everyone know how it goes.



I installed Fedora 2 on one for my friend and everything seemed to go well, though I had to leave shortly after. The install was on a Hitchachi Deskstar SATA drive on the promise chipset. Graphics card was a Geforce FX 5950 and was not having any issues after install of os or the updated NVidia drivers. It detected the PCI Netgear NIC but apparently not the onboard Marvell gigabit, which I thought was supposed to be the 3com chip, but I guess they changed it from the original K8V Deluxe.

[lauterm]

Chaintech VNF3-250 also works. I'm not sure what SATA chip it is, but FC2 is installed on my SATA drive. I've had no problems with this board , except it doesn't have Gb Ethernet. However, it was a good bit cheaper than any of the NForce3-150 series mobos that I saw.

[mhec]

first off, this was a server install so don't ask me about sound or AGP graphics (although I did do a graphical install)

The only issue I had was with the whopping selection of SATA and PATA controllers on the board. Took me an hour of messing with diffrent combinations of my 3 hard drives (2 PATA, 1 SATA) + CD-ROM till I found one that worked.

1. The promise PATA raid controller is not recognized by FC2 (even if you tell it to act as a plain IDE controller via the BIOS.). Perhaps this is intentional?

2. The Via SATA controller is is recognized but does not use libata (perhaps it is only well supported on later kernels), so I avoided it.

3. The promise SATA controller is recognized by FC2 and it uses libata (i.e /dev/sdx Vs. /dev/hdx).

4. The Via PATA controller works as expected as well.

I choose to use 3 and 4 above in a Raid5 + LVM setup. Worked fine.

The only other issue I had was with the Marvell Gigabit NIC. Although it was recognized and worked (more or less), it spewed out errors in the syslog. Apparantly this board has faulty firmware for the NIC. Luckily, the driver can correct the bug via software. A patch to do just that made it into 2.6.7-rc2, which is in the latest kernel rpm available here:

http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/2.6/RPMS.kernel/

Using the new kernel has solved the problem for me.

Hope this helps.

[Zubir]

while i can use my SATA drives with the K8T NEO under FC2, it won't recognize my RAID 0. the raid controller is the VIA VT8237. it also takes an intolerably long time to boot, especially compared to FC1, which wasn't quick to start with on my old Nforce 2 board.

[Dok]

Just installed on a Tyan Tiger K8W. This board has the Silicon Image Sil3114 SATA controller that can do RAID 0 and 1. Installing to the SATA drives works fine. Installing to a RAID 0 or 1 array (created in the Silicon Image bios) doesn't work. FC2 still sees the two drives as separate.

This isn't a problem for me, I set up a software RAID 1 in FC2 that does the same thing.

Brad

[SmyTTor]

Ok, so here's my update.

SATA install using VIA RAID was a no go. Not only did it not recognize raid 0 or 1, but I could not even do an install to a single drive on the VIA chipset- it kept locking up.

SATA install using the Promise chipset does not work in RAID 0 or 1 either. It sees the drives individually. So I did WinXP on the first drive and FC2 on the second drive and the installs went through without error. I am now in my first log-in and nautilus failed right off; the updater locked up. I installed FC2 on another athlon 64 machine (the install only takes 16 minutes total time, how awesome is that?) that I had here and the exact same problem occurred.

From what I can see, SB Audigy works fine, GF FX5600 and monitor working great, both network cards (compaq server NIC and the fairly new Marvell onboard NIC) were installed and pulled addresses from both an internal LAN and an Internet router.

Being still relatively new to modern Linux (excluding the past few months, my last install was Slackware about '93) I'm going to have to take a little while to get familiar setting everything up and tracking down what's not playing nice. I can say that the 32bit version of WinXP is not playing nice at all with various NICS; It seems mainly driver issues at this point.

[Slinwagh]

I have managed an install on my Asus k8V SE.

I can install on any sinlge SATA disk, any controller, any channel.

As for RAID configs I only see two single disks in RAID 0 config (Fastrack) and no disks at all RAID 0 (Via)

Is there a fix/patch available?

[kingcrowbar]

Motherboard: MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R
HardDisk: Samsung 160GB SP1614C SATA

Harddisk connected to 1st SATA channel of the Via controller, DVD connected to Primary-Master IDE of the Via controller. Promise controller disabled in bios.

HardDisk appears as /dev/hde

Installed FC2-x86_64 from harddisk using loadlin from DOS to boot the vmlinuz/initrd.img which i extracted from the 1st cd image. Only tweak i had to make was to check if dma was enabled because it wasn't enabled for me during and after installation of FC2-i386. Pressing ctrl-alt-F2 and running hdparm -d1 /dev/hde around the timezone selection part fixed it for me. Everything install took about 25mins, rebooted and came here
Now i just need to make the hdparm -d1 stay over reboots

hth

[bazzoon]

ASUS k8v
athlon 64 3200+

I had the usual CD install for FC2. It went just fine with no problem. I installed the system on a hard drive connected to the via sata on the mother board.

Well, it is worth mentioning that the install failed for the FC2Test3. The sata drive was not recognized then. The problem was apparently solved in the final FC2 released.

[Zubir]

Originally Posted by kingcrowbar

Motherboard: MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R
HardDisk: Samsung 160GB SP1614C SATA

Harddisk connected to 1st SATA channel of the Via controller, DVD connected to Primary-Master IDE of the Via controller. Promise controller disabled in bios.

HardDisk appears as /dev/hde

Installed FC2-x86_64 from harddisk using loadlin from DOS to boot the vmlinuz/initrd.img which i extracted from the 1st cd image. Only tweak i had to make was to check if dma was enabled because it wasn't enabled for me during and after installation of FC2-i386. Pressing ctrl-alt-F2 and running hdparm -d1 /dev/hde around the timezone selection part fixed it for me. Everything install took about 25mins, rebooted and came here
Now i just need to make the hdparm -d1 stay over reboots.

hth

As root, type "emacs /etc/rc.d/rc.local," then add the following line:

hdparm -d1 -c3 -a64 -X66 -k1 /dev/hde

Click "Save current buffer," and the change will stay after reboots.

[laBa]

Hi, I'm a noob with linux. I tried installing FC2-x86_64 from DVD on my KV8-MAX3 MB on the onchip VIA SATA controler, but it hangs during post installation config & it took hours to reach that!

I succeeded in installing mandrake-10_i586 worked fine on the same VIA controler. My silicon image 1134 controler is disabled.

You guys think it's a hardware problem?


thank you

I managed to install, after enabling both SATA controlers. I had my Silimage 1134 controler disabled.
every thing is ok now, but takes forever to boot :\ is that normal? like 5-10min to boot?

[ckasprzak]

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.