COntinued ASUS A7N8X-DLX/SATA Install Problems
 

I've done many searches, but I've yet to find a solution to my problem.

After many years (I last ran Slackware years ago), I decided to install Linux on my machine.

It turns out my motherboard - an Asus A7N8X Deluxe - is problematic. Indeed, I have two SATA drives on the beast, two PATA hard drives, and two optical drives. No, there's not a lot of room in my machine.

Both SATA drives and one of the PATAs is used for Windows, one of the SATAs being the primary boot drive. I'd like to install Debian on the other PATA drives - probably by inserting a floppy with a bootloader on it.

I simply can't get any Linux install running on the machine. I've also tried to boot DSL and Knoppix - no go. When it tries to bring up the SATA driver, the machine locks up. I've tried NOAPIC and all that jazz to no avail. I should mention that my Windows backup/restore utility uses a Linux distro to do its restore, and that won't boot either. That's no good, especially considering the number of times I have to reinstall Windows.

So, do I create a custom install kernel that simply doesn't try to load the SATA drivers, as I won't be using the SATA drives while in Linux, anyway?

Thanks,
Kris

its the nvidia sata driver
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&ct=...ucJpKsQZzM5fsI
seach for sata_nv and you will find plenty of ppl with problems

Incorrect. The ASUS A7N8X Deluxe does not have any NVIDIA SATA controller (the nForce2 does not have any SATA controller at all). The A7N8X Deluxe has a Silicon Image SiI 3112A for a SATA controller



I haven't encountered any problems with the sata_sil driver in ages. The only issue is the annoying blacklisting of certain Seagate drives with it though which brings the performance down to a crawl.

kpfeif, have you tried the installation with the 2.6 kernel? (by specifying linux26 at the installation CD's initial screen). If not, try with that too.

I haven't tried using 2.6. I'll give it a try tonight.

I have an A7N8X-X (non deluxe version) and 2.6 was much kinder to this mobo.
I never bothered to figure out what it was, but more stuff just seemed to work.