suse 10.2 sata install problem

I'm having problems getting SUSE 10.2 to install on my new motherboard. An ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe.

When running through the setup SUSE somehow thinks that my sata drive is setup for raid when in actual fact I only have one sata drive connected to my motherboard. I have checked and the RAID option in the BIOS is disabled.

The installation works fine up to the point when it tries to install the boot manager (GRUB) I get an error box Error occurred while installing GRUB but there is no information about the error.

I have also tried using LILO but the setup still fails at the same point although LILO is a bit more helpful and at least gives me some information about the problem

raid_setup returns offset = 00000000 ndisk = 0
BIOS VolumeID Device
Reading boot sector from /dev/mapper/sil_aeafdhbjcjcd
Fatal: Sorry, don't know how to handle device 0xfd00

I have also tried the install with the sata drive plugged into each of the 6 sata ports on the motherboard with the same issue.

I can however install Ubuntu 7.04 beta 1 on the system with no problems, the setup recognizes the sata drive as a single drive.

Anyone have any ideas on why SUSE seems to think that I have a RAID setup and wont install?

I think something's faulty somewhere, software or hardware wise.

I am willing to bet that SuSE 10.2 does not support the SATA ports on this motherboard. If you want to use SuSE 10.2, I suggest going to an IDE hard drive or wait until SuSE 10.3 is out, which might do the trick in the future. I did search around the Internet and found several people complaining about the SATA side of this chipset though nothing specific to SuSE 10.2. Like many things, don't try to swim upstream too long or you will drown, go with the flow and install a PATA HD.

Thank You,

I had something similar while installing Fedora. I had to use "nodmraid" as a boot argument. When the installer shows the line

boot:

you should add "linux nodmraid"

I hope that helps.

The problem is fixed, I was posting this problem on a couple of other forums and someone said

It looks like your raid array was built on a silicon image controller instead of the nvidia bios. I had the exact same problem migrating my raid from a Asus K8N-e to a M2N-e. The solution was to do a low level format of the drives using the hd utility (MaxBlast in my case) and recreating the raid.

So I low level formatted the drive, which in itself was a PITA as I don't have a floppy on this machine and openSUSE 10.2 installed first time