Question re: Installing Slackware on SATA
 

Reposted from Slackware forum

I'm having significant troubles installing Fedora Core 3 on my SATA drive so I'm considering Slackware.

I've seen posts stating that they were able to install successfully on an SATA drive and I've seen some saying I need a different D1 ISO. So, I'm pretty confused as to what to do.

Here are my system specs:

Processor: Intel Pentium 4 2.4ghz
Motherboard: Intel D845PEBT2
Chipset: Intel i845PE
Memory: 1GB DDR3200
Video Card: NVidia Geforce FX 5900XT
Sound: Onboard 82801DB/DBM Audio Controller
Hard Drives: 120GB SATA Maxtor (1 partition with Win XP), 75GB SATA Seagate (un-partitioned, planning to put FC3 on here)
SATA Controller: Silicon Image SiI 3112 SATALink Controller
IDE drives: Lite-On DVD Player (Secondary Master), Plextor PX-708A (Secondary Slave)

Does anyone know if I'll be able to put the regular version of Slackware on the Seagate drive or will I need to take some different steps in order to install?

Thanks for any help!

You need to make a bootdisk (floppy, see doc & script on Slackware CD 3 or 4) with a new kernel supporting SATA (& all the stuff needed for a bootdisk: initrd & ramdisk etc). Then you insert the rootdisks and follow the usual Slackware setup.

Be careful: your kernel must fit on a 1.44mb floppy, you will have to strip some of the kernel features ... but once Setup is complete you make a new kernel which supports all of your hardware.

Important kernel options (among others): CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM, CONFIG_BLK_DEV_OFFBOARD, CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE_SATA, CONFIG_SCSI_SATA, presumably CONFIG_SCSI_ATA_PIIX.

Another solution is to install Slackware (with a stock kernel) on a standard IDE drive, boot with a new kernel supporting SATA (this kernel is not limited in size), migrate your Slackware on the SATA partition, make corrections to lilo.conf & fstab, set the correct root device for the migrated kernel, and reboot ...

If you don't know exactly what you're doing, don't do it !

Good luck.

no bootdisk is needed. just make sure in the directory of the kernels of the first install cd you have sata.i together with the others. when you boot from the cd type sata.i for choosing a kernel although it´s not in the list.
the hard disks will be hda, hdb,...
after that get a 2.6 kernel, compile it for sata support, change your fstab file by replacing h with s for the hard disks
hda1 -> sda1 and so on

slack-current has sata.i in the 1st cd

that´s how i did it

KISS - keep it simple stupid

deiba maa mu i slack :)

edit: btw i have 2 sata seagate 80gb, no raid though

Your solution is more simple, thanks.

BTW last summer when Slack 10 hit the Store there was no such simple solution. I must admit that I didn't check Slackware-current for a while and I didn't know there was SATA support now.

But this means you have to dl and burn a Slackware-current, which is not always possible.

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Ducharme's Axiom:
If you view your problem closely enough you will recognize yourself as part of the problem.
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