Getting kernel panic when installer starts formatting partitions. Was: [Centos] How to get 3Ware 9500S controller card working in CentOS 3.1?

[schaefer+centos@xxxxxxxxxxx (Bart Schaefer)]

On Fri, 16 Jul 2004, Sean Staats wrote:

> *Hardware specs:
> ----------------
> Supermicro SuperServer 6013P-T with 2 2.6GHz Xeon CPUS, 4GB RAM, and 4
> 250GB Western Digital SATA drives attached to a 3ware 9500S-4LP in RAID
> 5 mode.

If this means that the 3ware 9500S-4LP is also accessed by the 6013P-T as 
a SATA device:

My experience with SATA devices is that the kernel is able to access them 
correctly, boot from them, etc. but that the installer can't deal with it 
(at least not without appendding SATA device driver modules to the boot 
parameters) and that lilo et al. have trouble writing correct boot sectors 
to SATA devices.

My only success with installing CentOS, RH9, or Fedora-1 on a machine with
a SATA boot disk has been by first dropping into the motherboard setup and
setting the ATA/IDE to "legacy" mode so that the SATA device appears as a
standard IDE, then switching back to "enhanced" mode after the install was
complete.

I have to go through this again with the rescue CD every time there's a 
CentOS kernel upgrade, to get the boot loader installed correctly.