Having been using Suse for some time, I wanted to change after Novell's pact with the devil and decided to return to Fedora, which I used to use when it first came out. I have downloaded and burnt the 6 CDs, which seem to have burnt OK. Fedora installation hangs, giving error messages that seem to relate to a SATA RAID array I have, which works perfectly in Windows XP but has never worked in Suse. I use IDE drives as the main boot drives.

My system is:

Asus A8V Deluxe; AMD Athlon64 4000+; 1GB RAM (2 x 512M matched pair); XFX Nvidia Geforce7800 GS; 2 x IDE drives (from which I dual boot XP and Suse 10.0) plus 2 identical SATA drives running as striped RAID, set up with VIA in windows,

The Fedora installation loads the ihc-1394, Promise and SiL drivers, starts the X-server, switches to the black screen with the 'x' cursor in the middle and then nothing more. I can move the cursor with the mouse but nothing else happens. If I drop out of X (ctr-alt-F1), I see the following:

1.2.3.4.5. X server started successfully
ERROR: sil: only 3/4 metadata areas on /dev/sdb, electing...
/dev/sdb: "sil" and "pdc" formats discovered (using pdc)!
/dev/sdb: "sil" and "pdc" formats discovered (using pdc)!

Yes - the last two lines are identical and, again guessing, I think they refer to SiL and Promise onboard RAID controllers or their drivers.

Any suggestions guys? I only use the SATA drives for Warcraft/X-plane Flight Sim, which do not write any files anywhere except in their own folders, so I can simply copy all the data elsewhere if you are going to suggest removing or re-installing the SATA raid system. Then I can copy it back.

Mike

Hi Mike,

I know very little about RAID but perhaps the following is of some interest to you:

http://www.wideopen.com/archives/ata.../msg00022.html

It looks like its using promise whereas perhaps it should be using SiL?

Regards
Chris

Thanks, Chris. You were pretty nearly correct. In fact my drives were incorrectly connected and set up.

I disconnected the two SATA drives and reconnected them to the CORRECT SATA connectors, enabled the Promise SATA RAID device in the BIOS, rebooted and used the FastTrack BIOS option to delete and then re-setup and initialize the RAID array.

Next time I tried to install FC6 it just worked. I did have a few problems insisting that I did NOT want to use the RAID array as my root partition. But I persisted and in the end it let me do exactly what I wanted.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

Mike

my configuration also similar as mikey's amd 64 bit and sata hard disk. Iam also getting the same problem "getting a black screen after installation". I dont know how to disconnect sata drives can anybody tell me the detailed procedure??