Debian ASUS K8V-X install on SATA System Hard Drive

[Mitchell Laks <mlaks@verizon.net>]

I have just installed 2 systems with debian sarge linux2.6 kernel on a SATA 
drive. It works, but I needed to spend time to debug issues before I got it 
working.

I use the asus K8V-X motherboard, Athlon 64 processor and it is not clear from 
the bios how to set up the boot from the sata drive. I spent some time 
setting the parameters.

BIOS Headaches:

You will spend much time to troubleshoot the two screens in the "Boot Menu"
You will need to play with this yourself,
 but I document for my setup (with no CD rom, just multiple Parallel drives on 
the parallel IDE cables and a single system SATA drive on sata cable) 

2 Crucial screens in the bios:::

Screen "Boot Device Priority"
1rst boot device         250GB WD parallel drive

(dont ask me why I couldnt list the sata drive here - bad bios !!!)

Screen "Hard Disk Drives"
1rst boot device         250GB WD parallel drive
2nd boot device         via <something that corresponds to the sata drive>

I have  no idea why that works;

Then I have the grub stanza

title           Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.8-1-386
root            (hd1,0)
kernel          /vmlinuz-2.6.8-1-386 root=/dev/sda2 ro
initrd          /initrd.img-2.6.8-1-386
savedefault
boot


Thus I ended with setting the sata drive as (hd1) in the bios and in grub.

I have no idea about why this works: 

Next: my parallel ide drives were incredibly slow, I could not enable DMA 
(using_dma=1), until I put
 
via82cxxx

as the top driver in /etc/modules.

Once I did that, my drives spun!!!

Otherwise I am happy with the machine.   
 Mitchell Laks