Linux drivers? for Intel DQ35JOE mobo

[wheresmybacon]

Linux noob here. I'm trying to install SLES 10 on a machine with an Intel DQ35JOE motherboard. After booting with CD 1, the install fails after not finding the CDRom. Fine. So I put the installation disc ISO's on a large external USB drive, enter the path and off I go. Until I get to point where it wants to partition a drive for the install, and the only one I see there is the same USB drive I'm installing from.

It appears to me the installer can't see the system drive because it doesn't have drivers for the controller.

I've tried all manner of settings for the controller in the BIOS. Nothing works.

My question is where can I find drivers for this controller and/or motherboard? There are other onboard devices and I'm guessing they probably won't work either. Where do you guys find drivers?

I've tried Linux in the past and I always run into a driver problem. I work on it for a while, research the web, then invariably get frustrated and quit. Well since this is at work, I can't give up. I need to make this work.

Any help you can offer is much appreciated.

 

[xSauronx]

try a live CD from another distro and see if anything can see the hard drive, sounds like its either a driver problem with the SATA controller or the sata controller itself has a problem.

worst case scenario you get a cheap internal sata card. i googled a little but didnt find anything helpful, and since an ACC game is about to start...well, sorry

 

[Nothinman]

I've never looked at SLES 10 but if it supports AHCI and you've got that enabled in your BIOS I would think it should work.

 

[wheresmybacon]

Originally posted by: xSauronx
try a live CD from another distro and see if anything can see the hard drive, sounds like its either a driver problem with the SATA controller or the sata controller itself has a problem.

worst case scenario you get a cheap internal sata card. i googled a little but didnt find anything helpful, and since an ACC game is about to start...well, sorry

I'll try the live CD idea. I've heard of that but hadn't tied it before.

The hardware itself is fine. It's brand new and I've built it as XP Pro with success. I've also grabbed other identical hardware and get the same result.

Thanks for the idea. I'll report back.

 

[wheresmybacon]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I've never looked at SLES 10 but if it supports AHCI and you've got that enabled in your BIOS I would think it should work.

Yeah I've tried it as AHCI as well as IDE. No dice. This is so frustrating!

I get the loading Linux kernel scree during setup, then it craps out and gives me a "Could not find the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Installation CD."

Linux will not defeat me this time. I will forge ahead.

 

[Nothinman]

Are you stuck on using SLES 10? From a little googling it looks like it uses the 2.6.16 kernel which is relatively ancient and I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't support the controller on that board or general ACHI.

 

[wheresmybacon]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Are you stuck on using SLES 10? From a little googling it looks like it uses the 2.6.16 kernel which is relatively ancient and I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't support the controller on that board or general ACHI.

I'm not sure. The software we have was ported to Linux from UNIX a couple years ago. Well the Linux guru has since retired, and now I'm faced with making the whole thing work on new hardware since our old hardware is out of warranty and not worth keeping on maintenance.

The "Live" system we have is actually running SLES 9, and I just tried 10 since we have a license with Novell and the ISO's in our admin software directory.

I'm going to try some new distros and see if I can make it work.

Thanks

 

[wheresmybacon]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Are you stuck on using SLES 10? From a little googling it looks like it uses the 2.6.16 kernel which is relatively ancient and I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't support the controller on that board or general ACHI.

Do you have a distro to recommend? I've been so busy today (at work). I'm downloading Fedora ISO's after my 15 minutes of research just now... hah

 

[Nothinman]

Depends on your requirements. I'm personally a Debian zealot, but I haven't looked to see what kernel was used for the last release since I use sid. Ubuntu or a recent Fedora release would probably work well too depending on what you like. If it's server-type software you probably want to look at CentOS instead of Fedora though.

 

[wheresmybacon]

After a nice relaxing weekend I'm beginning today by trying a liveCD of openSUSE. I have the Fedora ISO's, and I may also check into CentOS.

Thx again.

 

[wheresmybacon]

Looks like we're probably going with openSUSE 11. It worked right out of the box. Thx for the advice.

 

[postmortemIA]

Originally posted by: hungfarover
Looks like we're probably going with openSUSE 11. It worked right out of the box. Thx for the advice.

yep, and 11.1 is last release

I know my P35 board is not supported with anything older than SUSE 10.2