Hi,
I'm currently trying to install CentOS 5.5 on a series of Lenovo Thinkcentre nettops. At first, the install CD boots OK without any options, but when it comes to formatting, the process can only be described as terribly slow... it took about half an hour to format the 160 GB disk.
A few cups of coffee later, the system boots with the following messages on bootup (right at the beginning, when it says "Red Hat Nash starting...") :
****************** ... PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 7 of bridge 0000:00:1c.0 ... ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: no available legacy port ... ******************
And here's the output of lspci :
****************** 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82Q963/Q965 Memory Controller Hub (rev 02) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82Q963/Q965 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02) 00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02) 00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 02) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 02) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02) 00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 02) 00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02) 00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02) 00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02) 00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 02) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev f2) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HB/HR (ICH8/R) LPC Interface Controller (rev 02) 00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) 4 port SATA IDE Controller (rev 02) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02) 00:1f.5 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) 2 port SATA IDE Controller (rev 02) 03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5755 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02) ******************
I'm not very proficient about hardware drivers. Most of the things I know about them is the mix of information I gathered over the years when they didn't work as expected. My haphazard guess here would be that the disk is somehow treated as IDE, not as SATA, thus making the read/write operations much slower than theoretically possible (which would mean that somewhere in the boot process, the wrong driver for the disk is loaded). But then, it's only my guess.
Unfortunately, I don't have the slightest idea if there's a possibility to correct this behaviour a) during install, through some magic boot option maybe, and b) during normal operation once the system is installed. Blacklist something and add something else, my vague intuition says.
Before going for CentOS 5.5, I booted and installed Fedora 14 on that machine, which runs very fast (at least for my standards).
Cheers,
Niki Kovacs