Have an old machine, Penitum2 with a 6GB drive. Wanted to turn it into a file/printer server since this machine has USB and my printer has linux drivers issued by the manufacterer.
Anyway, I wanted to add a 200GB drive to it, and it being archaic, I know I needed a pci ide controller card.
I bought a SIIG Ultra PE4B12 V3. Googling seems to show that it works with linux, but there are 3 different versions out.

Having the card installed doesn't cause any problems as without it uninstalled. It only starts erroring when I actually add a drive to the PCI controller.

Here is an example when I tried it with CentOS 4.2:
"isolinux: Found something at drive = FF
isolinux: Looks like it might be right, continuing...
isolinux: Disk error 01, AZ = 4235, drive FF

Boot failed: press a key to retry..."

Machine locks up, can't press any key to retry. Error message looks about the same on other distros except sometimes it might say something like "Loading spec packet failed, trying to wing it..."

Same error on Ubuntu 5.10, Debian Sarge, and on FreeBSD 6 it won't load the kernel.

However on OpenBSD 3.8 it boots the install cd fine and seems to detect my drives fine. Didn't commit to the install though to check if it installs fine because I am really hoping to install Linux on this machine.

Any ideas?
I'm downloading slackware 10.2 and fedora core 4 right now to try with, but I'm guessing they will probably fail too.

Just found out my controller card use the driver SiI680. So it is supported by linux. But why does it fail when trying to install?

Does your new IDE controller have its own BIOS? If it does then try turning it on.

it does, how do I?
when the computer boots and it displays the controller cards little boot screen it has, it just says press F3 to configure drives, and it's basically very simplistic in design. you just add or remove a drive...

Is there a way to get it to show more settings?

I have bad news. I looked at the SIIG web site. Their product description says that this product is not compatible with Linux.

http://www.siig.com/product.asp?pid=437&catid=4&chsr=os

http://www.siig.com/product.asp?pid=437&catid=4

I'm sorry to say that it always pays to check compatibility before purchasing any hardware for Linux.

Not true, it uses the SiI680 (I can run linux just fine if i work around my problem).
Just annoying that I have to.