elijah wright wrote:
The machine is a Dell "Dimension XPS Gen 2". It appears to have an Intel ICH5 SATA controller. I really haven't been able to extract much more detail than that.Apparently beta3 has better SATA support. Can you try?This may have something to do with device mapping in the BIOS -- I may not be feeding the right information to lilo and/or grub. Or it may have something to do with the fact that my system doesn't appear to have a 'compatibility mode' for SATA -- lilo and grub may simply not support SATA natively.my dell gx270 doesn't have compat mode for SATA either [in fact the bios is pretty brain-dead] but grub doesn't seem to have a problem with it. what kind of board do you have? i think i missed that detail.
Intel's software RAID driver has to be disabled entirely from the system BIOS (not just RAID turned off in the RAID driver BIOS) for Linux to recognize the disks' existence. Every installation I've attempted with this BIOS setting leads to grub saying "GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB...." forever on startup. (lilo gives "L 99 99 99 99 99 ...") Perhaps there are sekrit configuration choices I need to make when installing grub? (And if so, how do I make them ?!?)
(Oddly enough, if Intel's RAID driver is reenabled and turned off, lilo will load, but since Linux can't find the hard drive, it dies while booting...)
The machine also has a PATA IDE drive (but can't boot from it at all), and two IDE CD drives. So it could be a device mapping issue, but I tried several configurations without luck. :-P