My problem in simple form:

The SuSE 8.0 installer constantly locks up on my machine.

Full detailed version:

I have a machine running on an Abit AT7-MAX mobo, and it always used to run WinXP from 2 striped 40GB hdds in RAID 0. The motherboard has the HPT374 RAID controller. I had previously set it up so that there was an 8GB primary partition, and a 70GB extended partition which I used for storage, so that I would not have to worry so much about backing up when reformatting the first partition. When I decided on installing SuSE, I made about 10GB of empty space at the end of the drive.

This is SuSE 8.0 I'm installing, not 8.1 - if anybody wants to know why, then this is because Highpoint have only released RAID controller drivers for up to version 8.0..

Normally the whole thing would just lock up the machine around the "probing hard disks" stage on the yast installation screen. It crashed numerous times, but I released that I was in fact loading the RAID controller drivers at the wrong screen (meant to load them at the Language Selection screen of yast, rather than the language selection screen beforehand).. So, I specified to create a swap and root partition formatted with ext3 AFTER the extended partition I used to store my data previously wth windows.

Well fair enough, it got under way installing, but crashed again whilst formatting the root partition.. grrrr... booting back into WinXP showed that it had in fact completely destroyed my extended partition when it wasn't meant to. GRRR.. there goes 50GB of data - good thing I backed up.

I tried a few more times, and these few times it has just crashed before I have even loaded the custom RAID drivers.

This is incredibly annoying, and I have no idea what's causing it, whether it's just my machine configuration, the RAID controller, or whatever..

Full spec:
- Athlon XP 2000
- Abit AT7-MAX
- 128MB Gainward Ti4200
- 2x 40GB Maxtor 740X hdds
- Booting from downloaded ISO burnt to CD in a Pioneer 16xDVD-ROM slot in drive.
- WinXP on 8GB primary partition, NTFS.
- Used to have 60GB of storage space in one logical partition in an extended partition after the WinXP partition. Was formatted as NTFS (was going to change to FAT32).

Grrrr

Any help much appreciated, thanks.

Just tried again in text mode to see if it was an unstable graphics mode... still crashed on probing hard disks..

D'oh.

Oh, and just to show how screwed up it all is, this is what the partition screen of the WinXP cd shows:


C: Partition1 (MAIN) (NTFS) 8001MB
    Unpartitioned space 60338MB
F: Partition2 (Unknown) 784MB <-- the swap
G: Partition3 (Unknown) 7217MB <-- meant to be /
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Unpartitioned space 4294959295MB
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Unpartitioned space 691023MB
J: Partition6 (OS/2 Boot Manager) 1473537MB
H: Partition4 (OS/2 Boot Manager) 1MB
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Unpartitioned space 4293649328MB
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Unpartitioned space 1418319MB
I: Partition5 (OS/2 Boot Manager) 1476609MB


I can't think of a strong enough way to say WTF... I am going to delete all the partitions apart from the 8GB MAIN partition, holding WinXP.. then try again.

Oh wow, fantastic - managed to restore that whole 60GB storage partition using PartitionMagic's 'undelete' facility.. amazing.

However, I'm still at square one.. any suggestions?

Tried again with just ONE partition on the machine - an 8GB NTFS-formatted partition containing WinXP.

This time it didn't lock up, it just gave an error saying "An error occurred during the installation".. this happened whilst probing the hard disks, again.

Dodgy RAID drivers, maybe? I have no idea what I can do now..

The other console screens report nothing interesting, apart from Ctrl+Alt+F4, which has the screen full of the following line repeated:
kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-107, errno=2
It seems to have produced this error for "block-major-xxx" up to 107... repeating the line 16 times for each "block-major-xxx", where xxx is a number.

Any help still appreciated,

you may want to try this
http://sdb.suse.de/sdb/en/html/promise80.html

This would be a perfectly plausible solution if I could actually get to the screen that allows me to partition my hard disks. The crashes always occur before this screen, i.e. after Language Selection and before Installation Settings..

Hi

I have Dell Inspiron 8500 with 60GB harddisk

I would like to install Suse Linux 8.0, Linux 8.2, WindowsXP

So I have installed Linux 8.2 and WindowsXP and made partition
for Linux 8.0

Linux 8.2 ans WindowsXP works very well,

Problem is when I try to install Linux 8.0, it hangs up
with "probing hard disks"

Please help if you find a solution.

Thanks.

hi

I have found the solution :

use manual installation,

when it shows usb-core, usb...., ....,
accept all of them but not ethc=hdd

and all works after