VIA Chipset - No Sata Drive, recommended Mobo?
 

Hi Everyone,

I have here a MSI P4M900M2-L motherboard, but Linux does not see a hard disk during the install of any of the common distro's.

I assume this is down to the VIA chipset. So my question is either, how can I get CentOS 5 to see the drive, or do I need a different Motherboard?

If so, please make recommendations for motherboards that support the Q6600 cpu and ideally have onboard VGA.

Hope this helps
 

If you are installing to a SATA drive, try installing to a PATA drive instead. The linux distributions you are using may have older kernels that can't see your SATA drive. Then if you can install & boot the PATA drive, you can upgrade its' kernel to one that supports your chipset & sata drive. Once the SATA drive can be seen with the fdisk -l command you can partition it the same as your PATA, dd copy the PATA partitions over to the SATA drive & make a boot label for it in lilo.conf.

I hope this will help you. Since you didn't specify the type of drive you were trying to install to, I just assumed it was a SATA. I had a similar situation trying to install Mandriva-2006 linux. In my case the 2.6.12 kernel that Mandriva supplied wouldn't install on my SATA drive but would install on my PATA drive. Unfortunately it would only boot the PATA to a (very) limited useless non-gui shell. I had to do the "kernel shuffle" from a private rescue cdrom before I even got Mandriva to boot PATA into X. Then I had to wait till the Linux Kernel.ORG to created the 2.6.18 kernel which supported my SATA drive & VIA 8251 southbridge chipset. GOOD LUCK !!

Thank you very much for replying Ssenuta,

I hadn't thought of that, I am not sure if it's beyond my abilities, but I will give it a go tonight when I get home.

The drive is indeed a sata drive. It's a WD Raptor 150gb.

Alternatively, you can check your BIOS to find out whether the SATA drive is running in AHCI or IDE mode. You may have better luck if you set it to use IDE. There was a similar issue affecting some early adopters of Fedora 7. They had to revert to install using IDE first before they could get it work with AHCI.

It ought (note; ought not definitively is) to be possible to get this working in spite of the VIA chipset; via chipsets are often more of a struggle to get working than more mainstream ones. In particular, they often respond to the boot parameters like noacpi, nolapic, etc.

There was a specific problem with SATA and 64 bit up to about 2.6.10. Centos 5 is more recent than that (12/04/07 release, but you may want to check the actual kernel version; I don't have an actual kernel version for Centos 5) and shouldn't be troubled by that; in any case, the recent problem was 64 bit only and therefore the 32 bit version should provide a way of testing out that proposition.

Nice drive (a bit on the hot/noisy side, but fast), but, from what I remember at introduction WD held back the features of the of the SATA interface 'for backward compatibility' with the previous model (74 G Raptor). There is a possibility that you have to turn off NCQ or even SATA 2 and go down to SATA 1 in order to make it work.

Thankyou all for your help, I struggled with it and gave up. Replaced the board with a Gigabyte one and had no problems at all.