SATA 2 @ Debian Stable, No Partitionable media

Hi everybody,

I have a brand new ASUS mother board (details are given at PS 1)
with an AMD64 on it and has two ~150GB SATA2 Seagate hard disks.
Via BIOS settings I configured them as each others mirror (raid).

I did boot from Debian Stable Sarge 3.1 DVD
and even tried with linux26 boot option. However, I consistently receive two error messages.

First one, ethernet obstacle:
[!] Detect Network hardware
No ethernet card detected.
If you bila bila bila...
. No ethernet card
. varios ethernet types
.
.
.
.
. none of the above

If I select no ethernet card, installation goes on.

Second Error Message
[!] Partion disks
No partitionable media
No patitionable media found.
Please check that a hard disk is attached to this machine.

At this point installation halts, I reboot.

What am I suppose to do?
Is Debian the right way?
What was the mistake? Asus NVDIA or debian?
Waiting for your support.

PS1:
These are the lines on my motherboards box
Socket AM2, NVDIA nForce 430 MCP, HT2000 Mt/s
Dual-Ch, DDR2 800, PCI-E x16 slot, 6-CH HD Audio
Gigabit Lan, SATA 3Gb/s, ASUS O.C Profile Q-connector, Q-FAN2, Green ASUS <RoHS Compliant>

PS2:
Mirroring is not mandatory. I would appreciate Debian if I can install it on at least one of my sata disks.

I have disabled the raid/mirroring form BIOS settings.
Tried to install Windows XP and it did it well enough...

Then tried to do it with Debain stable DVD (including the boot option linux26)
but yet again the same error message (of course no ethernet therefore net install cd of Debain seems useless)
"No partitionable media
No patitionable media found.
Please check that a hard disk is attached to this machine."

I believe neither Debian Sarge nor kernel 2.6 support SATA.
However, I presume that this cannot be the case since there are a lot of people with Sarge & Sata.
But there is something really wrong that I am not aware of...

No, it's not. I had the same problem back in June when the AM2 platform became available. The standard 2.6 kernel in Stable is just too old. See also this thread where I refered to this link.

Thanks for your valuable support Dutch master.

However, my problem prevails.
I booted my server from sarge-amd64-2.6.12-netinst.iso, the linked that you've provided from http://tinyplanet.ca/~lsorense/amd64/
but I still confront with the same error messages.

No Ethernet detected
and No partitionable media found

Since I cannot access my SATA disks and without Ethernet I cannot go any further, installation aborts.

I am frustrated because even the sarge-amd64-2.6.12-netinst.iso, which has obviously a 2.6.12 kernel, could not detect my SATA disks.

Now I am downloading the testing version of Debian
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/we...4-binary-1.iso



Let me know if I have some other changes
or a different way to run Debian on my server
or testing version is enough?

Testing (also known as Etch) has an even more recent kernel (2.6.16) so it should work. However, I'm very surprised that the boot CD from Mr Sorensen didn't work, it worked for me. Did you also updated the pci-ids file as I did?

Thank you for keeping your interest...

While I was in the office I could not arrange my time properly
and just downloaded sarge-amd64-2.6.12-netinst.iso
and burned it to a cd. As you already know it did not work out.

But correct me if I am wrong,
I will unrar sarge-amd64-2.6.12-netinst.iso
and shall locate the latest pci.ids file where appropriate
and burn it to a cd and try to boot from it once again...

I appreciate your support.
Thank you very much

Latest pci-ids file can be obtained here: http://pciids.sourceforge.net/ Put that file in /usr/share/misc and it should be found by any kernel.

I do have an IDE disk for the system to reside on, and use the SATA drive as /home. Makes live much easier, I admit

ooooo
ooooooooo
and
oooooooooooooo
that changes everything...
I let you know tomorrow
Lets see what is going to happen..

OK
I've added one IDE disk to my mother board.
And installed Sarge with linux26 boot option, everything is OK, up and running.

What am I suppose to do know in order to use my SATA disks?
:-)

Upgrade the kernel to the latest stable version. You won't find it in the Debian repositories, but building one from source isn't as difficult as one might fear Get the full source from http://www.kernel.org/ I've used this HOWTO several times with success, although it needs one minor adjustment: when building the initrd image, add the -o flag to mkinitrd as it otherwise will send it's output to /dev/null (default behavior now) The command should look like this:

mkinitrd -o /boot/initrd-2.6.18.2.img 2.6.18.2

if you use the 2.6.18.2 source.

Here's how you do it the "Debian way":
http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/system/kernel-pkg.html

If you put in --initrd in the make-kpkg line it'll make the initrd image when you actually install the kernel package.

I've been compiling kernels on a nearly weekly basis, and doing that under Debian is painless so far.

Have fun

Thanks for your valuable support guys...

I will try to compile the new kernel (Debian way) late Monday night.
At the moment, still at work :-), and I am checking/comparing Linux distributions' Sata support.
Shall inform you soon

Thanks in advance

PS 'Debian Testing' detect automatically.

Hi,

I do face the same problem as Janus did. My system has same config but for the processor being a Pent D. I would be thankful if anyone can explain me how to update the PCI-id file. I have both the DVD version and also CD version of Sarge. I uncompressed the debian-31r3-i386-binary-1.iso and tried to locate pci-id file but couldnt.

Thanks alot

Isn't that difficult. Download the latest file from the source previously mentioned in this thread and copy that (as root) to /usr/share/misc

cp <path/to/file> /usr/share/misc

Hi Dutch Master,

First let me thank you for the interest shown.

I'm a beginer and this is the first I'm trying to install a Linux OS .

My problem is that the installer does not detect network card and the SATA disk. First I tried to run with boot option 'linux26'. No use.

Here I take your advice that updating pci-id file could help.

I have downloaded the latest pci id file from the link you have provided. When I tried for updation I couldnt find the directory 'misc' in /usr/share.
And as per Nix's advice ( cyberciti.biz/tips/importance-of-linux-pci-id-repository.html) I tried dpkg command (dpkg -L pciutils | grep pci.ids) to locate pci-ids, but I found that dpkg does not exist at all.

Im really confused. Kindly advice if upgrading the pci-ids will work and that I'm proceeding in the right direction.

Thanks again.