Kernel panic when trying to create filesystem on SATA drive.
 

Hello,

I'm trying to install Linux on a system.

Seagate Barracuda 160.0G SATA drives x 2
Asus P5K-E WiFi motherboard
Intel ICH9R chipset
JMicron JMB363 PATA / SATA RAID controller

I've tried to install both Debian 5.0.3 and Gentoo 10.1 (Minimal). The Gentoo distro kernel is 2.6.31. I honestly didn't check to see what version the Debian distro is using.

With both distributions, I get a kernel panic as soon as I try to create the filesystem. I can see the drives just fine, and can partition them. The problem doesn't happen until I try to create a filesystem.

I've tried configuring my SATA drives in the BIOS as IDE and as RAID, as I have seen suggested on the forums.

Most every post I can find on the issue of kernel support for SATA drives is at least three years old, so I have to believe that SATA support has become ubiquitous, but obviously I'm missing something here.

Thanks,

Joe

Hard to say, but in my experience it sounds like the motherboard isn't supported.

Hi,
I have add a similar problem with an Asus P5Q Pro sometime ago, older kernel distro would not install at all (Mandriva 2008.1, and others)
But now it accept Debian Lenny and Mandriva 2009.1 wich use newer kernel.

Gentoo 10.1 is using 2.6.31, which is pretty darn new.

Joe

[SOLVED] Kernel panic when trying to create filesystem on SATA drive.
 

Ok, I tried several other distributions, and had the same results.

I did discover that I could create a filesystem, but only up to a certain size. I started with a 1G partition and created a filesystem. I then incremented the size until I started getting the kernel panics around 25G. But this wasn't a bad spot on the disk, because I could format four 20G partitions just fine, but I couldn't format a single 25G partition.

So, I took the *very obvious* next step of running memtest86, and discovered the problem--I had pulled two memory sticks out of the closet to bump up the RAM on the system, and apparently the memory was bad.

I removed the bad RAM, and now it works fine.

Needless to say, those RAM sticks now reside in the trash can.

Thanks,

Joe