Problems installing Gentoo on Biostar TS6100-939 w/SATA hdd

[soriyath]

Hello !

I have a problem installing gentoo on my computer. Installation freezes at "loading sata_nv". Same issue can be found on this topic. However, since nobody has answered yet and my current issue is a little bit different, I have started a new topic. I looked for information for a while and I couldn't find anything suitable.

I am running a AMD64-3100 on a Biostar TS6100-939 motherboard. I have two SATA disks of different sizes (side note: I am not interested in RAID, if ever a solution had to forbid the use of RAID options). So this motherboard has a NVidia 6100 chipset and a Nforce 410 chipset. I don't know which one is northbridge and which one is southbridge. I don't even know the difference between this "bridges". However, it seems that the drivers for the sata (software) controller is in one of these chipsets.

So, installation freezes at "loading sata_nv". I tried to put: "gentoo noload=sata_nv" on the installation boot options. It goes through ok, but freezes later when loading something else, at 80%. I tried downloading an earlier livecd, 2004.1, which had a kernel 2.4 (since 2.4 had ataraid support but 2.6 doesn't). It doesn't work either.

Since I am no expert in linux and/or programming, and do not want to spend 20 hours trying to fix something, I want to find an easy solution. Like put the cd in and wait for the install to finish. Something (almost) that easy. On this regard, I have the following questions. Will the Gentoo team release a new livecd that'll fix issues with newer sata drivers, such as this one? Are hardware solutions, such as PCI controller/adapter, supported by Gentoo? I am thinking here about PromiseTX2 or TX4, or cheaper cards like SUGOI cards (no idea what chipset they use, it is a japanese brand).

These Promise TX2 and TX4 cards claim to be supported by Suse and Red Hat. However, they're pretty expensive. They're about the price of an 80Gb ultra-ata HDD. Furthermore, having a PCI controller would reduce the speed of SATA, since PCI do not allow 150Gb/s. So is it better to buy an 80Gb ultra-ata HDD, a PCI controller or just wait for a newer release of Gentoo?

Thank you for your concern.
Soriyath

[fangorn]

I would suggest booting a knoppix cd and checking your hardware with it. The newer kernels all support nv_sata (using it witout problems for quite some time now). If you have your knoppix up and running see the output of "lsmod" and "lspci" to see what drivers are loaded for what hardware. If knoppix does not load the same drivers as the gentoo live cd, I dont know how to avoid the live cd from loading these drivers. But there are several other live-cds out there, even for 64 bit environments.

Sadly you will not be able to setup your gentoo from knoppix if you want to build a amd64 system. The Problem with knoppix is, it is a 32 bit x86 build and AFAIK there is no way to setup a 64 bit environment out of a 32 bit environment (I'd be very glad if somebody would proof me wrong here )

[soriyath]

Thanks for the idea of checking the hardware. I'm going to try and see what driver is loaded for the sata drives. However, I did boot the installation alright on Gentoo 2004.x livecd (x because I forgot which one I used) but I couldn't detect my hard drives.

I know that there are several livecd. I used AMD64 livecd. Do you think the installation could go alright with a 32 bits livecd?

edit: I can do it ok with a 32bits livecd. However, I can't get the network to work. Somebody installed a 64 bits version on the same motherboard with sata drives by using a 2.6.13 kernel.

[fangorn]

You can probably boot from a 32 bit live cd, but you cannot install a 64 bit gentoo linux with it!!

As the 2004.x live cds are fairly outdated, I would suggest you download a 2005.1 minimal installation cd (under 100 MB) and try this one. Newer kernel and all.