I just picked up an Asus A8N-VM-CSM and am attempting to boot on an SATA disk. I'm running Slackware 10.2 with a newly compiled 2.6.14.4 kernel, and I'm using the latest BIOS for the motherboard. I've compiled support for the file system, scsi_generic, scsi_disk, the SATA support under the SCSI section, and I still get a kernel panic (can't sync, VHS can't mount root, etc.) when it tries to mount root during boot. I can get it to work under the deprecated IDE SATA support, but it's horribly slow. My lilo.conf has root set correctly and I've made sure the current config has been loaded into the MBR. I've also tried passing the correct partition as a paramter to lilo. I'm using the correct /dev/sdXX format and device. I've read as many relevent threads as I could find, but none of the solutions fix it. The sata controller is the MCP51, which from what I can tell from the kernel changelogs, is supported in 2.6.14.4. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Hello and welcome to the forum. One question about your post. Why do you think the linux kernel supports your controller again? Nvidia doesn't. And from what I can see, there is no mention of your controller chipset being supported in any changelog. Drivers are chipset specific.

Your motherboard is pretty new and very integrated. Which is fine for doing standard pc things, but not for server things like RAID. You will notice alot of people have read your post but not responded. The reason is that there is nothing to say. It don't work.

If you want RAID you can get a kernel supported hardware RAID card from 3ware or LSI or the like and not have to worry about software revisions to be able to boot your pc. You will need to disable the onboard jumper for Nvidia's(insert software crap chipset here) SATA RAID and also in the BIOS if/when you get a RAID card.

You may one day be able to make this work with software emulated RAID in the kernel, if this board becomes popular. Nvidia has already said they won't support it- because it's for windows kiddie OS's. Servers do not run software RAID for a reason. And it's because it doesn't work in the long run... or the short run, as in this case.

I know you are hoping to squeeze and tweak every last bit out of this board, but there is nothing that you can do about it. People have lost weeks to months of their lives on these 30 cent chips. I'm hoping to save you the trouble. Skip a few movies/dinners and get hardware RAID. It will cost as much as your motherboard, if you do choose that path. Good luck.

Well, I never said anything about trying to get RAID working, thanks for the reply though. For anyone else in my situation, I found the solution. The driver wasn't present in my kernel config because I had set and forgotten the option to filter out drivers that weren't mature. I unset it, set the correct driver and problem solved.