Problems with moving to 2.6.6 on ASUS P4C800-E with ICH5

[esvoboda]

I have an ASUS P4C800-E with a WD740G Raptor plugged into one of the SATA ports on the onboard Intel ICH5R. I've gotten the system up with the 2.4.25 kernel from gentoo-sources. I am now having a problem getting the 2.6.6 kernel (development-sources) to work.

I can boot from the LiveCD using the SMP kernel (2.6) and can mount my partitions from that, allowing for the drive name change from hde to sda. However, when I build my own kernel with Intel SATA support and make appropriate changes to grub and /etc/fstab, the system gets through many of the init scripts but freezes before giving me a login prompt.

At present, the last lines I see are:

input: USB HID v1.10 Keyboard [Logitech USB Receiver] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-2
input: USB HID v1.10 Mouse [Logitech USB Receiver] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-2

I built another kernel with no USB support and switched to an old PS/2 keyboard. When I tried that kernel, the boot process simply stops at the point before these USB messages. Therefore, I do not believe USB has anything to do with the problem. I do see from the earlier boot messages that my drive is being detected by the Intel SATA driver.

I'm about to try studying the init scripts to see if I can locate where the freeze is occuring but I am hoping someone out there might already know what the cause of the problem is.

By the way, I am not loading any modules. I do see that the SMP kernel on the LiveCD is loading the disk-related modules sata_promise, ata_piix, and libata. For the moment, I don't care about supporting the Promise ports. Wouldn't building in Intel piix support into the kernel preclude me from having to load these modules?

I've tried researching this issue here in the forums but all been able to find is what appears to be speculation, attempts to play with the BIOS, etc. The LiveCD works. I shouldn't have to make changes in the BIOS.

Maybe another approach is to try to build a kernel and modules closely modeled after the SMP kernel on the LiveCD, ensure that it works, and then back out anything that I don't need. I don't see this kernel listed in the Gentoo Linux Kernel Guide so I don't know how to recreate it!

Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated! I can also follow up with more details if you need them. Thank you.

-Ed

[esvoboda]

I see that there is an open kernel bug on this:

(sata ich5) kernel hangs at ata initilization
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2302

Part of the reason I want to move to kernel 2.6 is that I've seen sporadic hesitation. I noticed that moving my USB mouse seemed to "wake" things up sometimes. It turns out that there's an ICH5 bug regarding this as well:

High interrupt load with ICH5 and ide-scsi
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2426

Due to these bugs, I am not sure that there *is* a way to get my hardware configuration running perfectly on Linux. I am going to research to see if I can find a workaround. I will post if I do. MAYBE the reason booting the LiveCD 2.6 smp kernel and then mounting the drive works is because I am not booting directly off the hard disk but I am not sure.

[yuza]

I had exactly the same problem with the same mother board... the system was awfully sluggish and locked up. I solved by using ck-sources-2.6.4. You might want to give 'em a try...

[Phlogiston]

And what bios settings do you use? I have here a MSI Neo-V with 848P Chipset and ICH5. And I can't even launch teh live cd properly, the system freezes at several points of booting... What can I do?
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Workstation: 5.1 SurroundSound, LIRC remote control; Laptop [IBM-T43]: patched sources, s2disk/ram, fingerprint sensor