Fedora Core 3, nForce3 & SATA - no drives!

[hpx]

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??

[/./.]

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]

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/show_bug.cgi?id=135302

[Dog-One]

Doing a network boot using the nForce3 onboard NIC (forcedeth) requires quirks (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=137740) as well. Wonder if the two bugs are an nVidia issue...

[hvdmerwe]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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/show_bug.cgi?id=140367. Or you can just grab an rpm that I already fixed from http://www.wtamu.edu/~mlauterbach/kernel-2.6.9-1.681_FC3_SATA.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".

[hpx]

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/show_bug.cgi?id=140367. Or you can just grab an rpm that I already fixed from http://www.wtamu.edu/~mlauterbach/kernel-2.6.9-1.681_FC3_SATA.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".

I downloaded the rpm and installed it. However upon boot it hangs probing PCI hardware (wheras my custom 2.6.9-1.667 kernel boots fine). Has anyone got this to run?

[Dog-One]

I did an upgrade from FC2 to FC3 with a RAID0 xfs filesystem; motherboard is a MSI K8N Neo FSR and all went fine. Since I have no CD, I booted by copying the isolinux directory to my /boot folder and used the hard disk install from a DVD.iso. I suspect the kernel image in the isolinux folder must be different than the kernel used for a normal CD-ROM boot.

In any event, using the method above, you could easily use a different kernel to workaround the problem, but you may run into trouble getting the modules in the initrd.img to load with a different kernel.

If you can get to some sort of a running system, try the isolinux trick and see if that works for you.

[lauterm]

hpx, if your kernel booted fine why are you trying to use mine?

[hpx]

hpx, if your kernel booted fine why are you trying to use mine?

Too see if the sata_nv driver can actually see my drive. My kernel boots, but the drive shows up as an ide drive (hde) not scsi. It seems that the SATA IDE support is being depeciated so unless someone fixes sata_nv, future kernel releases just won't work.

The short answer: I was hoping that it would work.

[lauterm]

hpx, I've had no problems with installing to SATA with my nForce3. Maybe there is something different about the nForce3 Ultra chipset that your motherboard uses. Also, are you running 32bit or 64bit FC3?

[drkbg]

i'm trying to install FC3 on SATA drive without success.

My Configuration is Athlon 64 on Asus Nforce3 motherboard (without secondary SATA controller) and with 200GB SATA Drive.

Are there any external drivers I can use?

[hpx]

hpx, I've had no problems with installing to SATA with my nForce3. Maybe there is something different about the nForce3 Ultra chipset that your motherboard uses. Also, are you running 32bit or 64bit FC3?

I have a shuttle SN95G5 - A nforce3 250 chipset, running the AMD64 version of FC3

[dwilcox]

I just tried installing FC3 x64 (DVD) on a MSI K8N Neo2 with two 160Gb SATA drives configured as a RAID1 with Windows XP on them. When the install came to the part of partitioning the drive(s), it showed both drives, instead of a single RAID drive. I had to choose a partition on one of the drives to have / as the mount point. There was a "Software RAID" option, but choosing that didn't work as the install complained that it needed a / mount point on some drive. I choose a dual boot setup with XP as the default OS, and the installation completed successfully.

However, when it rebooted after the install, Windows came up and said that there had been a problem and gave me the standard Windows boot options (Normal, Safe Mode, etc), but Grub never loaded to let me choose Fedora. I think that FC3 only installed on one of the RAIDed drives, and therefor XP decided to "fix" the problem it saw with the boot sector.

So, how do I install FC3 on a RAID dual boot drive? I don't really need FC3 to use RAID, but XP has to on this installation.

Thanks,

Dan

[David59]

I plan to buy the same config as HPX : Shuttle SN95G5 with nforce3/AMD 64/SATA Hitachi Drive

How did you exactly manage to install FC3 ? Did you enabled "SATA1/2 DMA transfert" in the bios, or something different ?

Do all 32 bits applications work correctly in FC3 64 bits ?

Thx

[stodge]

I tried to install Fedora 3 on an MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum, but I can't get the grub menu up. I'm using an old 20Gb, so it's not using an SATA drive. Disappointed to say the least.

[rsrini]

I tried FC3 in Asus K8NE-Deluxe mother board with Nvidia 250gb chipset and Seagate 120Gb SATA hard disk. It failed to identify the hard disk eventhough it loaded the sata-nv driver. I changed the SATA cable from Nvidia SATA connector to Silicon Image RAID0 connector. It installed without any problem.

[i814t]

There have been a series of reports that indicate the size and number of drives on the sata ports causes different results. One person reported that a single 160GB drive gave no problems at all with the kernels greater than 2.6.5

There are reports that the 2.6.10 kernel has a patched version of the sata_nv module that impliments the fix from comment #4 in the following page.

http://bugme.osdl.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3352

The 2.6.5 and earlier kernels use the depreciated ata driver and by all reports seem to work well.

I'm taking delivery of a Shuttle SN95G5 with a 300GB sata drive.
I will be doing some playing with this issue and let you know of the results.

[v_lestat]

i can confirm all this SATA RAID madness.

Promise S150 TX2plus SATA RAID, Nvidia SATA Raid on VNF3-250 , ASUS K8N-E Deluxe, and DFI Lanparty all fail to show /sdc which would be the single raid drive. all they see is /sda and /sdb with the raid partition(s) all located on /sda - /sda1 2 3 and so on.

attempting to load FC3 x86 x86_64 Suse 9.2 x86 and x86_64 Mandrake 10.1 x86_64 and every single other distro thats out there is a total no go.

this is absolutely jaw dropping. SATA RAID has been around for over 3 years now and not one single bloody distro out there can handle SATA raid for my 2 year old Promise TX2plus S150 !! ?? this is linux driver programming at its worse.

the silicon image 3114 controller on my ASUS K8N-E Deluxe is the same... no raid support.


and dont say go to promise.com either and grab drivers cuz those drivers dont work,, they are only for suse 8/9 mandrake 9 and Red Hat 9. and old kernels.

all i can say is i was getting excited about 64bit FC 3 until i find out it cant even run a bloody friggin SATA RAID controller that has been out for over 2 years.

it runs fine in single drive mode and runs good to on top of that, but to not have sata raid support for nearly all sata raid controllers out there both old and new is rubbish.

its another reason why linux is literally years behind.

thats not meant to offend anyone it is simply a statement of truth.

2+ yr old piece of hardware,, come on gimmie a break. what sata raid controller do i have to buy that FC 3 will actually use RAID ???? ! ! ! :mad: :mad:

[ahimosa]

there's answer in this link ===> www.sata-poil.hat_i.com (linoczka.blox.pl/html)

[stodge]

I have to agree with v_lestat: despite the great reputation Linux has for applying fixes, this major boo-boo is still outstanding. I'm stuck with Core2 as Core3, Slackware 10.1, and many other more recent distros don't work with SATA. Shocking.

[antus]

I think the thing with linux is its hardware support is a bit hit and miss due to hardware companys not releaseing specs, not releasing drivers or releasing binary on drivers which become useless to those with new systems really quickly. I have seen people in the past who buy their hardware, then try linux to discover it doesnt work very well. I think you really need to do the research and buy properly supported hardware in the first place. This both rewards the companys who co-operate with the open source community and means you dont have this grief. Im here as Im considering buying an nforce3 based board, but its looking a bit dodgy (even though my drives are IDE). I think I might go VIA chipset instead :/ (nvidia graphics cards/drivers rock though - will keep buying those) :)

[alphonsebrown]

I can't install FC4 on SATA drive, can anyone give me a clue?