I apolgize if this has been answered before but I have looked everywhere and could not find a solution for me. I've tried everything I know how to try.

I am trying to set up a file server using Slackware 10 (actually 10+ because I downloaded the DVD with all the newest packages; mainly so I could get the sata.i kernel).

I have a Epox 4PCA3+ Motherboard which has an Intel ICH5 SATA controller and a Highpoint 374 RAID controller. (it also has the intel primary and secondary IDE ports too - yes I could put 14 drives in this thing if I owned 14 drives)

I have a SATA 37 GB WD "system" drive on sata0 (/dev/sda), the DVD rom is on the secondary IDE master (/dev/hdc). I tried to hook up 2 300 GB drives to the highpoint controller and install Slackware and ran into issues, so I decided to make it simple by unplugging the 300 GB drives and installing slackware on the SATA drive. This worked perfectly. I then upgraded the kernel to 2.6.10 - this also worked perfectly. I am a very happy configuration here.

Then I try to plug back in the 300 GB drives into the highpoint controller. I can boot through Lilo - message "Loading Linux2.6.10......................" and then it says "Bios data check" and freezes - no "successful" or "unsuccessful" - just frozen. I didn't delete the old (2.4.28) kernel, so I tried to boot it from the Lilo boot and same thing happens.

I then tried to boot from the Slackware DVD....at the boot prompt I do:
"boot: sata.i root=/dev/sda1 noinitrd ro" - this works!

fdisk -l reports:

anyway - to me that looks like it worked. Which leads me to believe I have something wrong in lilo.

My lilo.conf is as follows: (without the comments)

Based on something I read I also had
in the global section but that didn't change anything.



So if anybody would be so kind as to point out where I am dumb, I would definitely appreciate the help. Like I said the main problem is after Lilo, the system gets to "Bios Data Check" and just hangs.


Thanks in advance
Dan

well...if anybody else has the same problem, I got around it because after LILO hangs the first time, it skips the Bios data check in the future (until you re-run lilo - then you just have to let it hang once).

Anyway, so now my machine works but intead of hanging on the Bios data check it reports "Bios data check skipped." I guess thats not a big deal, but I would think the bios data check is useful for something.

One last note for anybody who might have the same configuration: I had to use the highpoint drivers to make RAID work - even though its just a "software" RAID. (I wanted to use md to do the RAID, but without the highpoint drivers, it didn't detect the highpoint controller or drives at all) Unfortunately, the latest highpoint drivers (on their website) didn't compile with kernel 2.6.10, so I had to go back to 2.6.9.

I was then able to set up the RAID array in the highpoint bios, load the hpt374.ko module at boot time, and the drive shows up as /dev/sdb - perfect.

Hi dsp444,

You solution dodn't help me, but it took my on the right track.

My problem was that I have a Intel Dual Xeon SC5275-E Server with two biult-in SATA controllersm and one additional PCI 2ch-SATA controller.

4 SATA disks in total but only booting from the first two (connected to MB), in a RAID-1 setup.

Grub installed fine - but complained about the partition type when booting.

Lilo installed after some tuning, but froze on BIOS data check.

Solution:
Lilo has a option to skip this test.
By entering nobd as a boot-argument, or by setting the global flag 'suppress-boot-time-BIOS-data' in
lilo.conf, see 'man lilo.conf', the check is avoided.. and it boots fine.

Regards, Johan