Hi, Gang

After some serious hours of trying, I'm stuck.
Kernel is 2.6.8-24 (stock kernel on SuSE 9.2 boot CD)
BIOS is set to [auto] iro PATA/SATA
Both the ST380817AS (LBA, SATA, 80Gb, IDE Channel 0 Master) and the DVD combo (CD-RW, ATA33, IDE Channel 1 Slave) are correctly reflected
In 'Rescue' mode hda (?!!) and hdd (correct) are found

The Gigabyte board uses an Intel ICH7 Northbridge, 2 x 512 Gb DDR2-667, no additional PCI(-X) cards.

Setting 'apic', 'noapic', 'pci=[nobios/noacpi/nopeer]' respectively makes no difference. Idem changing the BIOS setting to 'Combined' (2 SATA, 2 PATA IDE), 'Not combined' (SATA simulated to PATA mode), or 'Enhanced' (1 x PATA, 4 x SATA, 6 disks in all).

I haven't tried to disable HT in the BIOS yet, tho' since the kernel caters but for 1 CPU that shouldn't matter ...

W2K installs and (however much I detest to give credit to MacroJunk) runs beautifully. Under Linux fdisk produces no hassles (although addressing the hda device), but once a filesystem has been created, any attempt to write to the SATA (via hda?) results in a complete non-event (system freezes).

Since I'm in 'Rescue' mode, 'lspci' produces just numbers, so its output might not be of help. I may be able to force the system to accept a PATA IDE as the primary drive, in which case I can boot from another disk (on which I run 2.6.13.3) and get some significant 'lspci' output.

Any ideas, suggestions ?



________________________
Peter K