Ray Van Dolson wrote:
>
> Hi all, we're trying to install CentOS 5.1 on a Sun Ultra 40. This is
> an AMD-powered machine and we're using the x86_64 version of CentOS
> 5.1. The machine is using the NVidia CK804 chipset and has
> SATA disks.
> It also has 16GB's of memory which prompted us to upgrade the BIOS on
> the machine from 1.1 to 1.6 per this (we also have the two quadro
> cards):
>
> http://docs.sun.com/source/819-3954-18/index.html#0_37092
>
> The install goes fine up until the installer is trying to format the
> disks. Part of the way through it simply dies and pops up an error
> saying that the installer couldn't format the LVM volume and
> we have to
> reboot.
>
> An examination of dmesg output shows that there are many SATA errors
> occuring at this point. Timeouts and such.
>
> After a reboot, the SATA drive no longer shows up -- not even in BIOS.
> It's as if the formatting has instructed the drive to deactivate
> itself. :) A hard reset and reseat of the drive in the SATA enclosure
> brings it back again.
>
> First thought was that the slot or SATA port was bad, so we have moved
> to others with the same result.
>
> Solaris 10 x86 installs perfectly on this machine, so I'm starting to
> think that the sata_nv driver is to blame here.
>
> We're in the process of trying 32-bit CentOS 5.1 on the
> system just for
> giggles, and may try Fedora 8 as well or RHEL 5.1 and use our paid
> support to track this issue down, but thought I'd run it by everyone
> here.
>
> Didn't see any existing issues in bugzilla.redhat.com or
> bugs.centos.org.
>
> Any insights on this?
>
> I will get the exact error messages posted up here soon (output from
> dmesg, etc).
Try "acpi=noirq" as a kernel argument. Some AMD chipsets have problems
letting the OS know what irq the 8250 timer is on, the nvidia one is
definitely a problem, I have the same chipset in a couple of Dell
Dimension e521 desktops :-(
-Ross
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