Hi,

I have a ASUS p4pe motherboard and among other cards, an Nvidia GForce FX 5500 128 Mb
graphics card installed in the AGP slot and a Silicon graphics ATA 133Mhz dual channel Raid adapter(SiI680).
The SiI680 gets the following entries in boot.msg when no drive is attached and the system Suse 10.0 is started in regular mode:
<6>SiI680: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:02:0e.0
<6>SiI680: chipset revision 2
<6>SiI680: BASE CLOCK == 133
<6>SiI680: 100% native mode on irq 9
In boot.msg I also see
<7>Boot video device is 0000:01:00.0
assuming that this is the NVidia card since I have no other video HW in the machine.
later in boot.msg the folowing is recorded:
<6>vesafb: framebuffer at 0xf0000000, mapped to 0xe0880000, using 10240k, total 131072k
<6>vesafb: mode is 1280x1024x16, linelength=2560, pages=1
<6>vesafb: protected mode interface info at c000:e2e0
<6>vesafb: scrolling: redraw
<6>vesafb: Truecolor: size=0:5:6:5, shift=0:11:5:0
<6>bootsplash 3.1.6-2004/03/31: looking for picture...
<6> silentjpeg size 112645 bytes,
<6>...found (1280x1024, 17839 bytes, v3).
<4>Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 158x59
<6>fb0: VESA VGA frame buffer device
which I interpret as 'vga device found and usable'

dmesg reports

nvidia: module not supported by Novell, setting U taint flag.
nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:01:00.0[A] -> Link [LNKA] -> GSI 5 (level, low) -> IRQ 5
NVRM: loading NVIDIA Linux x86 NVIDIA Kernel Module 1.0-7676 Fri Jul 29 12:58:54 PDT 2005
agpgart: Found an AGP 2.0 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0.
agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 4x mode
agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:01:00.0 into 4x mode
agpgart: Found an AGP 2.0 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0.
agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 4x mode
agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:01:00.0 into 4x mode

which again indicates that the graphics is A-OK

The system runs as expected.

The trouble is that when I connect 1 drive to the SiI680 adapter and reboot, I get nothing but a blank screen after choosing Suse from Grub.

The strngest thing is that if I choose the Suse safe mode option, the system boots ok into a text only mode and I can see the drive attached as hdg (first drive on 2nd SiI680 channel) the drive is empty and has one patition formatted with ext3 and seems usable in this 'safe' mode.

I need help to figure out how to boot into normal mode and stil see the drive.

All help appreciated
/Anders

So if you add sata HD to your working setup with ide HD you get problem? Or are you adding 2nd sata HD to sata-HD setup? And you have raid off right?
I have similar ASUS mob with nvidia controller chips and nvidia video card. Ide-HD disk worked fine for linux and XP. But before linux would install on sata-HD I needed a linux kernel with sata support. Even XP needed ASUS driver to see sata disk.
Check with SUSE about kernel support for sata disks. A newer kernel pkg maybe all you need. Good luck.

lestoil,

No I'm adding an ordinary ATA drive, no SATA at all.
Thnx

Sorry for misunderstanding. If you dont use raid turn it off and in BIOS boot from ide cdrom or hd. My ASUS P4 MOB has separate Promise raid sata chip but Raid is off and I can use HDs separately. Haven't used Suse in long time but nvidia driver seems correctly installed and framebuffer is used to draw terminal for instance. You can't boot to desktop but can access safe or rescue terminal.
I would check LQ Suse forum for blank screen on boot error. There may be grub parameters to pass to get framebuffer color login screen at correct size,there may be noapic or nolapic boot parameter needed, or you can try using vesa,vga or nv video driver in /etc/X11/xorg.conf to get to desktop and troubleshoot further. You can also check /etc/X11/xorg.conf that correct mouse and monitor display settings are used. Bitbenderforums has step by step Suse install guide.Good luck:.