My BIOS has possibilities "SATA as IDE" and "SATA as storage". Which should I choose? With Slackware 11 I had the same problem as with v. 12 now. Everything works as long as I don't switch the power off. My motherboard is MSI RS482M4. I tried both BIOS settings and kernels hugesmp.s and huge.s. With IDE or SCSI I have had no problems with Slackware. Any ideas?

I personally had trouble with the hugesmp kernel that shipped with slackware. I have since reverted to slackware11 for other reasons. I would recommend downloading a new kernel from www.kernel.org, compile and use that.

When you say,
do you mean that you can install the system ok but when you restart it doesn't work?

and if you boot with the installation media and don't run the installer but mount your root installation drive on the temporary /mnt from the cd/dvd, can you see a linux root filesystem, indicating that the installation was successful but there is something wrong with the boot process?

I have not seen that bios setting before - I have had ECS motherboards. The documentation on the website or that came with the mobo does not indicate what each setting is good for?

hope you can get it working.

MSI documentatation is very sparsed about SATA. Based on that I couldn't decide the right thing to do. Is MSI more difficult than other mother boards? SUSE Linux Desktop 10 SP1 seems to work quite good. I would prefer Slackware based on my earlier positive experiences. At the moment I don't have Slackware installed, but it is not too difficult to install it again.

I happened to see something today that led me to believe you should specify IDE mode for your SATA controller in the bios.

Thanks geek. I'll reinstall Slackware 12.

You will have problems with huge. It isn't supposed to run on any actual machine. it is just there so that you can find out the make / model of the H/W on your comp and then setup the correct modules to load with the genericSMP or recompile your kernel.

duryodhan :) You are talking about the kernel choices you have in Slackware 12, right? You have a huge one where all modules gets loaded and then you have a 'custom made' kernel kind of, if i got it right? According to the Slackware Site it shouldn't matter which one you use, so could you expand on this a little? What specifically are wrong with using the huge kernel aka what phreaks out?? And geek745 :) Could you give me a link to that site, about the Sata Bios please.

If you read the CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT file included with Slackware, it specifically states that you should not use the huge kernel -- and it points out a possible error you will receive. It's basically just for installation purposes. You should use the generic kernel also provided with Slackware for day-to-day use and create an initrd.gz (a necessary step!) to load the file system module. This has been mentioned several times in other threads -- for information on how to do this, a forums search should yield good results.

Wow, ok. i'll check it. Still somewhere in there it said that using the huge kernel shouldn't be a problem? Ah well :) one reads and read and ...

Btw: I'm using that one now :) So I'll know firsthand kind of..

I haven't read the docs in a few weeks now, but I think it said you could run the huge kernels but it isn't advisable and could cause some problems. Plus, the general idea around here is not to use it. Just for your info!

But doesn't it end up with only those modules that you (hopefully :) need?
How do you check on this? What it loads up in the kernel, so to speak? It's been some time since i was involved in Linux now and i'm kind of rusty :)

yoron: I was actually working with a micro-atx board for an embedded application when I noticed those SATA bios options. could be different for different people. that was a VIA mobo for their own processor.

in a running system, the command "lsmod" will tell you which modules are currently loaded into the running kernel. You can see a list of available (compiled) modules under /lib/modules/(kernelversion)/ - it's a whole tree so you'll have to list it recursively or go through it slowly on your own.

as regards the kernel issue - just get a halfway decent kernel out of the install media, then go download a stable release from http://www.kernel.org (or login via ftp: ftp ftp.kernel.org) and get the stable bzipped tarball. use that as your kernel. there are plenty of directions everywhere on building and installing kernels.

Thanks for the info geek745. I've been somewhat lazy regarding Linux for a while and it's surprising how fast one forgets nowadays ::)). But i enjoy the idea of xen and would really like to get Slackware to work on my Server. The problem is that it's a quadra core and i'm not sure what kernel would support that. But it's nice being back :)

I downloaded 'the latest stable version of the Linux kernel is: 2.6.22.5' and will test it on my dualcore laptop first. I noticed that the 'microcode' which i guess is related to the cpu came up as a failure in my inspiron 6400 on fedora7. So maybe it's only comercial stuff that support that kind of hardware yet? Awh sh** :)

yeah, between hardware support and the gamers, linux is still a half-step behind M$. Aside from that, we rock!

Linux supports much more H/W out of box than any other OS/kernel. Only issue is with those companies who are scared of open sourcing their drivers.