Hi all,


I put together a brand new shuttle sn41g2 v3 box with 2x 250gb serial-ATA drives (the motherboard is an nForce 2 board i think with IGP/MCP). the CPU is an athlon sempron 2800 and I added 1GB of DDR333 ram (2x 512 mb)

I've been trying to install a fast and secure linux distribution on it. I've tried slackware, debian, gentoo, fedora, knoppix, and arch linux. I want to use the machine for storing my huge mailbox (currently in outlook on a PC) and fetch my mail using pop. so I guess I would be running an IMAP server with a webmail frontend. I also want to run a webserver and a mysql on it, and samba for serving the files I work with every day. I want to use the serial-ATA drives in a raid1 mirror array and I want to boot from them (nothing else in the system besides the DVD-rom drive).

unfortunately, most distributions hang when the install CD boots, when it tries to detect the serial-ATA drivers/controller. I only managed to install fedora but seems like a heavy complicated system optimized for i386, so it doesn't care about my nice athlon cpu. knoppix boots fine, but I wasn't sure whether this would be a good starting point for a server... debian also manages to install but I had some trouble with the packages and getting the network to run so I dropped that idea. arch linux, gentoo and slackware all hang when the install CD boots (sometimes I get disabling IRQ 11 and then it hangs or irq 11 - didn't care).

I would really like to get my server up and running. does anyone know what is going on here? I thought serial-ATA would be no problem when I put the machine together ...


thanks,
bert