On Nov 24, 6:26 am, raylopez99 <raylope...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Nov 23, 4:48 pm, Erik Funkenbusch <e...@despam-funkenbusch.com>
> wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 23 Nov 2007 16:19:00 -0800 (PST), raylopez99 wrote:
> > > Really what I'm looking for in this post is a reply by an experienced
> > > installer who says: "been there, done that, it could be X,Y,Z...and
> > > good luck". Morale support more than anything.
I had problems installing "Generic" XP onto SATA drives, but I had no
problem installing SUSE Linux 10.
> > I have seen the problem before. Things to check:
>
> > Do you have any USB devices attached? I know, stupid question, you've
> > already whittled it down, just double check. Some BIOS's can have goofy
> > results with certain USB devices attached.
>
> USB available but nothing in fact attached.
>
I will assume that you've checked you boot sequence. You probably
want to make sure that your primary SATA drive has been properly
installed. The BIOS also has a "Compatibility" mode for the SATA
drives. This may have been defaulted to the harder to support AHCI
interface. The compatibility mode lets the BIOS "emulate" an IDE
drive (OS sees the drive as IDE instead of SATA). This does prevent
the command queing features of SATA-II.
> > Is the drive configured to be a primary master? Some bios's won't boot off
> > secondary or slave drives. Also, set it to Master explicitly, don't rely
> > on cable-select.
SATA drives don't have any selection jumpers. Since the SATA cables
are smaller, it's easier to run 4 separate cables instead of two
multiconnector "bus" cables.
> Yes. set in BIOS.
>
> > Try removing the CD-Rom after the OS is installed. Just for kicks.
>
> Too much bother. Jack in this thread is onto the real problem: SATA
> drives cannot be used to load Windows unless you load external drivers
> during the installation--you have six seconds to do so, and WIndows
> before Vista does not recognize non-floppy drives! And this system
> doesn't have a floppy (only a CD)! Screwed (unless you use a third
> party 'slipstream' utility, see below).
Check the BIOS, make sure that you are not using the AHCI settings.
Those familiar with Linux know that AHCI is often used with FireWire
drives, it allows the host to sent a series of commands in sequence
and have them asynchronously executed, when the requests are
completed, the host is alerted. Linux has good support for this, but
only commercial distributions have it compiled into the kernel. If
you have an SD drive or can boot off of IDE or USB drive, you can put
the root partition on that drive and let modprobe discover the AHCI
interface and mount the AHCI SATA-II drives in high-performance mode.
The simpler solution is to just set "Compatibility Mode". Normally,
unless you are using your desktop for a relational database of several
million records, you will have a hard time telling the difference.
Linux will still try to optimize for the real track and cylinder size
rather than using the default LBA settings.
> > Try "resetting" the BIOS to defaults. I've seen corrupted CMOS do that.
> > Also try clearing the CMOS via jumper.
>
> Too much bother. But thanks.
Resetting to defaults would probably set you back to AHCI mode.
> Yes, good point, I will install IDE not SATA. This is my latest
> workaround.
On Windows, there is very little difference in performance. On Linux,
you will see a substantial increase in performance with the SATA
drives, especially SATA-II drives. This is assuming that both drives
are 7200 RPM drives.
> Otherwise I'd have to do all kinds of tricks including
> using a third party utility to 'slipstream' the installation using a
> CD with SATA drivers (which for Hitachi I'm having a hard time
> finding) burned in: see:http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/archive/...28/423901.aspx
Do you know which motherboard you are using? The board in the cite
above was using VIA chipsets.
> Verdict: installation of OSes suck, and I doubt Linux is any better.
You might still have the AHCI problem, but ti's trivial to "fix". I
had no trouble installing SUSE 10.2 and SLED 10 into SATA-II drives.
> > If you have the ability to flash the BIOS to a later revision, try that too.
>
> This bios is from this year. Not the problem.
It's still a good idea to check. Often, newer boards, especially
those with SATA-II drives were released before the standards were
finalized. Even my T61p Thinkpad had a new flash for the SATA-II BIOS
interfaces.
The main difference beteen SATA-I and SATA-II drives is the higher
speed serial bus. Some mothereboards also have support for SAS
(Serial Attached SCSI) as well. Some new flashes let you "mix and
match" SAS and SATA drives. In much the way Linux squeezes more
peformance from SCSI drives, it also milks performance out of SAS
drives as well, especially if you configure multiple drives in RAID.
> Oh well, I didn't spend that much money so I can't complain (one-fifth
> of US prices). I'll simply use the SATA HD as a secondary HD, use an
> older IDE as the primary HD, and see if that works. I'll report back
> my results. Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it.
Looking forward to seeing your final solution.
> RL