Hi lads,

i got a problem recently, when i was forced to install Fedora 8 on modern Asus M3N78-EMH motherboard, with Atlon XP 64x2 4600+, and WD SATA2 HDD 320 GB.

The problem is that Fedora 8 installation did not detect SATA disk.

Disk was installed properly, the BIOS was detecting it on sata1 and showed that it had correct 320GB capacity.
But I wasn`t able to detect new SATA hard disk in Fedora 8 installation.
During the process, i was prompted to select driver from the list, i tried many of them however the result was negative.

I even tried Ubuntu 8.04 LiveCD in hope it detects the hdd drive - no success. I searched Inet, and found many people reported the same problem, and i found also a rumors that "somebody was able to install Fedora on M3N78-EMH".

I wasted hours jumping around the box, and finally I sorted this out, and got Fedora 8 installed, and I decided to share my knowledge with others who may be in the same problems.


1. First we need to go load BIOS , find HDD mode setting [/SATA/RAID/AHCI/], and set it to AHCI.

2. Next, boot up from Fedora 8 installation CD, press [TAB] to modify kernel boot options, and append the following options:

ata_generic.all_generic_ide=1 pci=nomsi


Whith these options i was able to successfully install Fedora 8 on my workstation. Now i have a problem with Atheros Gigabit Ethernet card driver, but i hope i can install some older and known NIC, update F8 to new kernel and i hope it will contain appropriate driver for Atheros.
It really doesn`t matter, because the main headache was to detect SATA hdd.

Hope my experience will help someone

There is a Fedora 8 respin too.

For the Atheros card ...the module is in the kernels since June

Fedora is surprisingly slow at releasing new kernels.. they're still on 2.6.25. If you're able to get internet connection then you'll still have to manually install the drivers, probably with ndiswrapper or madwifi

according to yum info madwifi:

Available Packages
Name : madwifi
Arch : i386
Version : 0.9.4
Release : 1.lvn9
Size : 226 k
Repo : livna
Summary : Kernel module and Diagnostic tools for Atheros wireless devices
URL : http://madwifi.org/
License : GPLv2
Description: madwifi is the Multiband Atheros Driver for WiFi, a linux device
: driver for 802.11a/b/g universal NIC cards - either Cardbus, PCI or
: MiniPCI - that use Atheros chipsets (ar5210, ar5211, ar5212). This
: package contains diagnostic tools you can use to get information
: about your madwifi Atheros wireless connections. You do not need
: this package to make a madwifi connection.

goodluck

also, as a second option for getting SATA hds to work... you could also change the setting to native ide in the bios, maybe that would have helped...

It works in windows, and I'm just throwing it out there..

as I planned,
I installed some older network card into my computer, and upgraded to latest kernel and other packages to latest version.
After rebooted, atheros NIC was detected successfully.