Hello,

I recently purchased a copy of Suse 10 to install on my new pc, and I have
yet been able to get the install to work. I am hoping that someone can
help me.

My pc has the following installed:
AOpen XC Cube Ex 761
AMD Athalon 64 3000
1 Gb RAM
100 Gb Maxtor DiamondMax Sata HDD
Memorex CDRW/DVD-Rom

Upon trying to install, Suse fails very early on, and sends me into manual
installation mode. From there, I can see in the system components that
Neither the DVD or the HDD have been detected. I checked BIOS and it lists
the HDD as Primary Master on Channel 2 and the DVD as Primary Master on
Channel 1. At first, I thought that perhaps Suse was trying to use the DVD
as the Hdd and the hdd as the dvd?

So to get around this problem, I installed a regular IDE HDD into Primary
Channel 0, only to have the same problem. Suse cannot detect the HDD or
the DVD.

So I took the DVDROM out and put in a regular CDROM in and tried to boot
off the CDs instead. Same thing.

I checked AOpen's website and found that the only BIOS available is Windows
compatable only, and doesn't seem to affect anything that would be causing
this problem anyway.

I've also tried playing with making the DVD a slave and unplugging the SATA
drive and just trying to install on the IDE drive. Nothing seems to work.

I'm just starting out on Linux (this will be my first fully dedicated linux
machine), so I don't know a whole lot of Shell commands yet. Anything
you can give me would be greatly appreciated though.

Thank you very much,

Did you check out which distro you purchased?
As far as I know, when I downloaded my distro from Open SuSe.org FTP site, there were separate downloads for 64-bit hardware. Maybe that's causing you so fundamental problems - I'm using SuSe myselfjust because of it's fantastic capability of recognizing all sorts of hardware.

I actually purchased a retail copy of it. And I tried both 32 and 64 bit versions with no difference.

I've used Suse 9.1 before on my laptop and had no problem either, so I'm kind of surprised that I'm having so much trouble with this particular version.

Well then, you'll obviously need some expert advice. I'm out of my depth here - being myself a Linux newbie.
Would like to help bearing in mind that I just received some very helpful advice from this forum, but...Sorry.

Another update to my problem:

I was looking at the Kernel Messages under The manual Installation section, and I noticed that near the end, it looks like the kernel hit some trouble with the IDE controllers:

SIS5513: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:02.5
ACPI-0212: ***Warning: Device is not power manageable
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:02.5[A] -> Link [LNKA] - > GSI 5 (level, low) -> IRQ 5
SIS5513: chipset revision 1
SIS5513: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
SIS_IDE: probe of 0000:00:02.5 failed with error -1
bootsplash: status on console 0 changed to on


Does anyone know what that means?

Have you tried installing in "Safe Mode" or adding the option "linux ide=nodma". The only times that Suse installs have failed for me have been DMA related. But then I don't have a blazing fast PC with SATA

Timothy.

Yeah I've tried that too.
I just registered my Activation code with Novell, so I'm hoping that perhaps they'll be able to tell me what to do.

It seems to me that I found somewhere on this (or some other forum) about problem similar to yours - problems with installing SuSe because of ACPI. As far as I can remember the solution was installing it in safe mode (disabling ACPI settings). You can check for it through Google search, if you want.
Anyway, I would rather wait for the answer from Novell - after all, it is their rsponsibility to provide you with the solution.

Yeah I did try both Safe mode and the mode with ACPI disabled to no avail. I know there are some ACPI settings in my BIOS, but I'm really not sure what they should be set to.

I'll be sure to post anything that I learn from this when Novell gets back to me.

I have an older system P3 800Mhz, but I had same problems when installing until i installed ACPI disabled then it went on perfectly. You can also try another distrobution like FC4 to see if the sme problem exist to rule out hardware issues, check to see if Hardware is supported by the distriution

I received some support from Novell so far.

Apparently, the SIS5513 board isn't compatable with linux yet, and my rep referred the problem to level 2 support. In the meantime, he gave me some extra switches to add to the ACPI Off Installation mode:

pci=usepirqmask
irqpoll
insmod=ide-generic

those commands allowed me to get further along the installation, and get as far as installing all of the packages, but the system fails to boot the initial login. I've tried booting to safemode using the above commands, but that doesn't seem to help either.
I've also tried to boot without the GUI, thinking that maybe the graphics are causing the problem, but that doesn't work either. The system halts after the following lines:

PCI: Probing PCI Hardware
PCI Probing PCI hardware(bus 00)
PCI: Ignoring BAR0-3 of IDE controller 0000:00:02.5

I'll keep posting the solutions that Novell gives me, in case anyone else has this problem, but if anyone can help me as well, that'd be much appreciated!

SOLUTION how to SUSE and SiS5513 installation

I used to have the same problem with my Fujitsu Siemens ScaleoP
Motherboard : GA-8S649MF

During the installation of any of Linux distros, including the SUSE 10.0 DVD, after loading of the sis5513.ko module teh installations stoppped because the linux could no see neither CD/DVD (IDE) nor HDD (SATA) since then.

The reason was that the IDE controller SiS5513 has been implemented in next generations of chips, like SiS965 in my case.
There is no SiS5513 anymore but the SiS9XX series are being recognized as the SiS5513, though they are various chips in fact, so that the Linux kernel gets confused (you may find very detailed descriptions of this problem on various linux foras as well as on the SiS-producer webpages)as below:


* The original SiS5513 comes from a SiS5511/55112/5513 chipset. The original
* SiS5513 was also used in the SiS5596/5513 chipset. Thus if we see a SiS5511
* or SiS5596, we can assume we see the first MWDMA-16 capable SiS5513 chip.
*
* Later SiS chipsets integrated the 5513 functionality into the NorthBridge,
* starting with SiS5571 and up to SiS745. The PCI ID didn't change, though. We
* can figure out that we have a more modern and more capable 5513 by looking
* for the respective NorthBridge IDs.
*
* Even later (96x family) SiS chipsets use the MuTIOL link and place the 5513
* into the SouthBrige. Here we cannot rely on looking up the NorthBridge PCI
* ID, while the now ATA-133 capable 5513 still has the same PCI ID.
* Fortunately the 5513 can be 'unmasked' by fiddling with some config space
* bits, changing its device id to the true one - 5517 for 961 and 5518 for
* 962/963.


So WHAT?

The SUSE 10.0 is based on 2.6.13 kernel version, that does not support the SiS965 chip.

SOLUTION : I have downloaded the SUSE 10.04A distro based on 2.6.15 kernel version and it has installed with default options and no ploblems at all!

Some patches are available in Internet but these are practically useless when you cannot install Linux first.

None of Linux distros (I have tried Mandriva 2005, 2006, Ubuntu 5.1 and older, SUSE 9.3Pro, AUROX, SLAX and a few other) was able to install on my computer. Some "Live!" distros (launched from CD where no istallation on HDD is needed) did work but they were not able to see my HDD.

The new Linux kernel 2.6.15 is the sollution !!!!

(some 2.6.14 with patch applied may work too but how to introduce the patch to the kernel when Linux is not installed yet ? ))

Thanks very much for the information!

I'll definetly have to give that a try!

The Suse 10.1 Alpha 4 released a few days ago has kernel 2.6.15. Got it in my box but I have never had a problem with the mobo hardware.

Thanks again for the info about upgrading the kernel. I downloaded SuSe 10.1A and the install went smoothly. However, when it reaches the initial login screen, I get the following error after entering my password:
"Could not start kstartupconfig. Check your installation"
After I press OK, it goes back to the login screen.

I've tried both my user account and root account to no avail. I've also tried reinstalling, but that didn't seem to help either.

If i use the failsafe login, it gives me a prompt to work with, but I don't know exactly what to do once I get to the prompt.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,