[solved] DG965RY, DQ965GF SATA hard drive, IDE CDrom

[dbc]

OK, so it's a little odd to start a thread with [solved]... but I actually found the solutions to my problems in the forums and thought I'd summarized them here so that anyone else with these boards has 'one stop shopping'. I built two systems, one with each board, and both had identical issues because they use similar hardware and BIOS.

There were three problems getting the 2007.0 live CD to work:

1. Buggy BIOS
2. Buggy IDE bus
3. boot flag

Taking them in order:

BIOS -- it seems that the product in the channel as of today (June 2007) still has some very early revisions of the BIOS. In particular, the buggy BIOSes lose track of the SATA drives. They *look* like they are OK, but then they disappear from *some* pages of the BIOS display, and the LiveCD can't find them when it boots. Solution: flash the BIOS. Intel has a nice .iso image of a self-booting CD that makes the operation slick-n-quick. Check the revision of your BIOS before even attempting to boot the LiveCD, or you will tear you hair out.

IDE bus -- These boards are SATA-centric, and the ATA peripherals are supported by a chip that has issues. Solution: Boot the LiveCD using the parameter 'all-generic-ide' to work around these problems. See previous thread:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-551504-highlight-dg965ry.html

Boot flag -- The BIOS insists on seeing the boot flag on the boot partition in order to load it. See previous thread:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-554968-highlight-bootable.html
Solution: Be sure to set the boot flag with fdisk or cfdisk when you partition your volume(s).

So... I've been using Slackware for many, many years, and this is my first attempt at Gentoo. So far, I'm finding it very much to my liking.

-dave