Fedora Core4 issues with NF4

[Hard Ball]

Hey all of you Linux installation gurus out there;

I was attempting to install FC4 on the following machine:

Asus K8N-DL (Nforce4 Professional chipset)
2 X Opteron 246 - C0 stepping non-OCed
3 GB corsair ECC 3-3-3-8
Antec True550 EPS12V
BFG 7800GTX
1 X Seagate SATA150 80GB
1 X Hitachi deskstar SATA150 160GB
1 X old 20GB IDE drive
DVD_ROM
CDRW
...
...

I had issues with the FC4 not recognizing the NV_sata controller earlier, so I got this additional IDE drive, just to get the installation going.

First I tried the FC4 install disk, which was a still a no go, which was stuck on recognizing the SATA_nv driver, I used the Debian installer package;

There were a few minor issues, which I worked around; but at a major problem, I couldn't solve so far:
After loading the installation files, scanning disk began, which went on forever, >2hrs on the same message, so I terminated it.

Then I went back to the FC4 install disks, and installed with "linux noprobe", and decided to test the installation disk stage, an error came up; which was wierd, because I have tested this set of install disks before, and it was perfect. So both the FC4 disk and Debian installer came up on somewhat different problems. Could these be related to some sort of issue with the HDDs and HDD controllers which I have overlooked. I thought that the sata driver issues could be worked around once I have a spare IDE drive to install on; is that assumption wrong??

What would be the best step to take next?
redownload FC4 ISOs and burn new disks; try a new HDD configuration, or something else I havn't thought of. Or would preformatting the disk in FAT32 help?

Please let me know what youguys' opinions are.

Thanks in advance
--HB

 

[n0cmonkey]

What's the problem? 😕

 

[Hard Ball]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
What's the problem? 😕

Well, that's what I'm trying to find out.

I don't know if the install disk from both redhat FC4 and debian are both corrupt, both have issues when installation ran into scanning disk, which seems to be too much of a coincidence;

or is there some other issue lurking in the background, causing me not being able to install correctly, especially since FC4 does not seem to have the correct sata_nv driver for the chipset.

I just want to ask you linux gurus in the forum, to see if there are any know issues with Fedora installing on machines with SATA drives, even though an IDE drive is also present; or could there be something that I'm overlooking during the installation procedure which is causing all these problems.

let me know.

 

[n0cmonkey]

It could be any number of things. Did you test the ram? If the discs are showing up as corrupt (despite passing the hash checks on other machines), try another IDE cable for the cdrom. Does it work if you disable SATA in the BIOS?

 

[Hard Ball]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
It could be any number of things. Did you test the ram? If the discs are showing up as corrupt (despite passing the hash checks on other machines), try another IDE cable for the cdrom. Does it work if you disable SATA in the BIOS?

I think the core of the machine is fine, since it's been running on WinXP for a couple of months without issue now; I have done a lot of ram test, run many hours of prim95, and 3DMark and the like. None of these presented any problem except when overclocking. And right now everything is at stock, so I don't think the CPU, mobo, RAM or video has any problem that has manifested themselves in the first 2-3 months.

If there is a hardware problem, I agree, would lie either with the Optical or the Hard Drives. I don't know what though, since FC4 doesn't seem to be able to find the correct driver for NF4 sata (by the way Windows works just fine on the sata controller), I don't know if that could be the root cause of all this. But I was under the impression that it shouldn't affect linux installation on IDE channels, or maybe I'm wrong.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Can you disable the problematic SATA in the BIOS?

 

[Hard Ball]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Can you disable the problematic SATA in the BIOS?

I don't think I can; or at least I havn't found a way to do so yet.

There are two SATA controllers, one is third-party Promise RAID controller, added by ASUS to the board. That I have already disabled, and does not seem to pose any problem.

The other is the native NF4 sata controller, which is integrated into the system chipset, and I have not found a way to disable it. Even if I did, that would mean then I cannot use either one of my SATA drives anymore. There has to be another way.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Hard Ball

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Can you disable the problematic SATA in the BIOS?

I don't think I can; or at least I havn't found a way to do so yet.

There are two SATA controllers, one is third-party Promise RAID controller, added by ASUS to the board. That I have already disabled, and does not seem to pose any problem.

The other is the native NF4 sata controller, which is integrated into the system chipset, and I have not found a way to disable it. Even if I did, that would mean then I cannot use either one of my SATA drives anymore. There has to be another way.

What it would mean is that you can re-enable them when you add support for them post installation. 😉

We don't even know if that's the issue yet though.

 

[Hard Ball]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: Hard Ball

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Can you disable the problematic SATA in the BIOS?

I don't think I can; or at least I havn't found a way to do so yet.

There are two SATA controllers, one is third-party Promise RAID controller, added by ASUS to the board. That I have already disabled, and does not seem to pose any problem.

The other is the native NF4 sata controller, which is integrated into the system chipset, and I have not found a way to disable it. Even if I did, that would mean then I cannot use either one of my SATA drives anymore. There has to be another way.

What it would mean is that you can re-enable them when you add support for them post installation. 😉

We don't even know if that's the issue yet though.

Hey, monkey, thanks a lot for all the replies so far.

OK, I guess there is a possibility that both the FC4 disk and the Debian disk were somehow corrupted since last time.

The stage "scanning disk" always refers to the installation disks, right? Or could it possibly refer to the HDDs themselves?

 

[n0cmonkey]

I believe that's just the installation media. I doubt the cds went bad since the last time...

I'd try switching some cables and/or optical drives.

 

[Hard Ball]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
I believe that's just the installation media. I doubt the cds went bad since the last time...

I'd try switching some cables and/or optical drives.

OK, I guess a couple of things I can try:

1) try to test scanning other installation disks, to see whether errors occur in all of them.
2) reburn a debian disk, to see if there is also corruption there; if so, then the problem likely lies with the Optical drives.
3) switching cables, optical drives. Although this will be a little more difficult, since at the moment, I only have one cable that has the physical specifications which will fit into my case with this mobo (because the IDE connector close enough for the opticals to reach are horizontal, and most IDE connectors protrude a little too much for it to work.

Anything else??

 

[n0cmonkey]

That looks like a good start.

 

[EatSpam]

I think 2cpu has a massive thread on this board. IIRC, the sata_nv issues were solved with the latest BIOS update.

 

[Hard Ball]

Originally posted by: EatSpam
I think 2cpu has a massive thread on this board. IIRC, the sata_nv issues were solved with the latest BIOS update.

Thanks, EatSpam,

I went there, and downloaded the latest BIOS 1006, and hope that this will work now.

I'm redownloading FC4 right now, and just want to see if download corruption of files was the problem. That will take a while, since my connection is just vanilla DSL. I will retry installation later tonight.