Hi all, Here's what happened. I dug up an old P2 machine and loaded it with 320MB of RAM and a cheap BIOS-less RAID card using a VT6421 chipset. I attached a 1TB SATA HDD to it and booted it up with the latest gentoo minimal install disk. I have installed gentoo before. The first problem I had is that the system would hang at

Scanning for sata_via....

I resolved this by booting with "nosata." This brings me to my first question: Will I be able to use my drive once the OS is installed? It seems like the answer would be yes, but I wanted to make sure.

After booting with the 'nosata' option the system would hang at

scanning for pata_qdi....

I resolved this by booting with 'noload=pata_qdi.' Now the system is hanging at:

attempting to mount media:- /dev/hdc

I have been searching but have not found anything definate on this one. One post ( i am sorry but i forget where; i was working on this for hours) suggested that the problem is caused by the age and speed of the drive. I really don't know much about these things. Can anyone confirm this? Is there a way to make it work, or do I have to replace the drive? If I replaced the drive won't the new one just slow down to accomodate the old motherboard? If anyone has any advice on this one, I would like to hear it.

Thanks for reading.

I couldn't find any answers online so I tried it again with the same RAID card on a slightly newer box. This time a Coppermine Celeron machine. The system boots up the "noload=pata_qdi." but once in I cannot find my sata HDD. This makes me think that the problem is indeed in the hardware. So I guess the new question is: is there an opticle drive that I can install in that old p2 box that will work with the gentoo disk. Also, how do I get it to find my new hdd once it has booted up?