I am unable to install Fedora Core 3 (x86_64) on my SATA hard drive. My motherboard is an ABIT NF8 (nVidia nForce3-250Gb chipset) running an Athlon 64 3000+ processor with 512MB of DDR400 RAM. Hard drive is a Seagate ST380817AS (80 GB SATA).
During installation, I get a message "Loading sata_nv driver..." and then, later in the installation I get "No hard drives found. You probably need to load a device driver for your hard drive to work. Would you like to load a driver now?". When it shows me the list of device drivers already loaded, it shows me the nVidia SATA controller driver there. I tried continuing and then hitting Ctrl-Alt-F2 to go to the shell and look at the output from dmesg, and I found something interesting... the SATA driver DOES initialize, but then it waits 30 seconds and bails out saying something (the drive? Can't remember right now) took too long to respond. Funny thing is that I was able to boot and install an old Slackware CD (32-bit kernel 2.4.18) on that same drive without any problems. I am having problems with SATA on any newer distro/kernel than that though. I have an old IDE drive (Seagate ST38410A, 8.4 GB) I could use for a temporary installation.
Would it work if I installed to this IDE drive, installed the driver package from NVIDIA, copied the whole installation to the partition of the SATA drive it should reside in, and reconfigured the boot loader so that Linux would boot off this partition? Any other less troublesome ideas? Thanks in advance.

You're computer looks like it's pretty nice. Please read this thread for some background if you want to fix the problem rather than the blame.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=311875

Thanks for the input. I read about it and found out what it is, a problem with one source code line in sata_nv.c causes the problem, however I'm still unable to install the system so I can comment out the problematic line and recompile the sata_nv module (despite the fact that even though I use Linux for quite some time I'm still not acquainted with kernel compiling and such). Is there anywhere where I could find a fixed sata_nv module pre-compiled so that I could write it onto a floppy and load it during installation?

Thanks in advance, once again.

Hello..

I'm using AMD64 3200, K8n Neo2 nForce3, and SATA HD (Seagate ST380871AS), I try to install Linux Red Hat Enterprse 4.0 with my SATA HD which already installed with Win XP.

Before this my WinXP has 2 partition C: and D: using partition magic, C: which is the 1024 cylinder and D: is FAT. So in partition Dnot in boot cylinder), i leave a space for this Linux, then boot from CD.

Then Linux detect my NV SATA controller.. continue until it ask for Create Partition Automatic, or manual (Druid).. First i've tried use Automatic Partition, but them it said that something error whit hard drive, not found Hard Drive for partitioning and ask me to check with my HD(something like that.. i forgot exactly what it said). The try manual partioning but facing same problem.


Could someone tell me how actually i have to do.. which step i did wrong.. Thanks

*sorry for my english..

It has to do with the kernel version, found that out some time ago. What apparently happens is that this hard drive/SATA controller combination (or one of these separately, think the SATA controller driver is to blame though) hits a bug in all 2.6 series kernels prior to 2.6.10. I don't know exactly what kernel version RHEL comes with, but if possible get a 2.6.10 or later kernel, it should solve the problem.