3112 Serial ATA hangs Redhat 9 install
 

I've been battling this problem for a couple of days with no luck. I have an off-brand Silicon Image 3112 Serial ATA card (Koutech) with a Western Digital Raptor drive attached.

The Redhat 9 install hangs during the kernel boot. It finds the SiI3112 controller, and detects the drive, but it hangs when the geometry and irqs are usually displayed in the boot process. It hard locks with no caps lock keys, and sometimes even the soft power switch on the box is disabled. Here's where it fails:

...
hde: WDC WD360GD-00FNA0, ATA DISK drive
hdg: no response (status = 0xfe)
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7, 0x3f6 on irq 14
<hangs here>

This drive and controller are working fine, since I can boot to DOS and fdisk/format the drive. Others have gotten this chipset and H/D combination to work in Linux. Some talk about setting "Legacy" mode in the CMOS settings, but I have no control over this particular card. I'm thinking about sending the card back and get the Adaptec 1210SA, but I thought I'd see if anyone else has had success with this setup.

Solved!
 

OK, I solved this problem, so I'm posting it here for other Googlers who may have the same problem. The problem turned out to be an interaction between the Redhat 9 installer kernel, the SI 3112 serial ata board, and the dual Athlon Gigabyte motherboard GA-7DPXDW+ also known as GA-7DPXDWP or GA-7DPXDW-P (so google will catch them all).

I ran Knoppix, which managed to boot the machine, but I got lots of APIC error messages on the console like:

APIC error on CPU1: 02(02)

This led me to search on APIC options, and so when I used this option at the boot prompt of the Redhat 9 install everything worked:
boot: linux noapic

I have a Western Digital Raptor drive which will run really slowly by default. You have to run hdparm to make it run at full speed:

hdparm -X66 -d1 /dev/hde
(Change hde to whatever drive it is using)

I did this as soon as the installer got to the graphical portion by hitting alt-F2 to go to the console. Hit alt-F7 to go back to the GUI. DO NOT change hdparms when the drive is doing things like checking for bad blocks, installing, etc.