On Thu, Mar 30, 2006 at 07:03:22PM -0500, Chris Mauritz wrote:

Gavin Carr wrote:

...

Just wondering if anyone out there has got Centos 4 installed on a Tyan S2895 (that's a Thunder K8WE) motherboard on sata disks? I know about the forcedeth bug, but I'm getting installation hangs at random spots in the install, even off CD, in what seem to be nv_sata timeout problems. SuSE 10 is rock solid on the same box, so I don't think it's hardware, and I've tried two different sets of disks to rule out disk problems. Latest bios updates - tried both 1.02 and 1.03.

The 2895 has some funky bios issues. Tyan blames Nvidia and swears up and down things will get better soon, but I'm not holding my breath. Tyan support has become rather poor compared to the "good ol' days" when I used to frequently deploy various incarnations of their Tomcat boards. Anyway....Tyan strongly suggested I use 1.03 in production on the 2895. There seems to be some problem with option ROM space getting unpredictably gobbled up. It caused me a lot of issues when trying to use an outboard RAID device under Windows. In your case, I'm inclined to think you've got a driver issue since it works with SUSE. When you say Centos 4, are you trying 4.3?

Yeah, I tried both 4.2 and 4.3 ISOs, and both i386 and x86_64. So have you got yours working with Centos + SATA Chris, or are you only using them with windows?

Cheers, Gavin

On Thu, Mar 30, 2006 at 07:59:38PM -0500, Chris Mauritz wrote:

<blush>

They're all running windows.

</blush>

:-)

We were using them with Cinelerra + Linux and the editors began to rebel and wanted some Adobe tools that only ran on Windows and OSX. So I caved. 8-) I find these boxes a lot more responsive than our dual 2.5ghz G5's. I don't have any "unix tasks" that need that kind of horsepower at the moment, though I'm probably going to deploy a rack of dual dual-core opteron boxes (using a different motherboard) running Centos when our web content launches in China.

I've got some spares around so I'll see if I can get 4.3 on one tomorrow and replicate your problem.

Are you using the RAID utility in the bios for the nvdia controller or are you just treating them as plain ol' disks? What disks are you using?

No raid, just plain 'old disks. The disks are Seagate Barracuda 7200s, 250G.

Thanks much, Gavin

Gavin Carr wrote:

No raid, just plain 'old disks. The disks are Seagate Barracuda 7200s, 250G.

Maxtor had a hard drive firmware update to work with an nforce4 motherboard that I had to do on another computer. I had to contact them for the firmware update, it is not online as far as I know, but this was the Knowledgebase article about it: http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/maxtor.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqi d=2685&p_created=1136595488&p_sid=ZRNfkT3i&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X 2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9MSZwX3Byb2RzPTAmcF9jYXRzPTAmcF9wdj0mcF9jd j0mcF9zZWFyY2hfdHlwZT1hbnN3ZXJzLnNlYXJjaF9ubCZwX3BhZ2U9MSZwX3NlYXJjaF90ZXh0P W52aWRpYQ**&p_li=&p_topview=1

Google for 'seagate nforce', and you'll find quite a few results. Like this one suggesting you contact Seagate for a firmware update: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=10755&st=0&p=77035&...

I've also had to jumper SATA2 drives down to SATA1 to be stable - not Seagate, but probably the same applies.

Good luck,

Greg

Hi Zube,

On Thu, Mar 30, 2006 at 07:08:53PM -0700, Zube wrote:

On Fri Mar 31 09:39:24 AM, Gavin Carr wrote:

...

Just wondering if anyone out there has got Centos 4 installed on a Tyan S2895 (that's a Thunder K8WE) motherboard on sata disks? I know about the forcedeth bug, but I'm getting installation hangs at random spots in the install, even off CD, in what seem to be nv_sata timeout problems.

I started down the painful x86_64 road late last year with CentOS 4.2. There is a message in the archives where I mistakenly attribute many of the problems I experienced to a Logitech mouse. Thanks for the opportunity to set things straight.

For the record, I tried:

disabling the SATA RAID, even though I had only one disk disabling the onboard SATA and using 2 different brands of PCI SATA controllers pulling my hair out

all to no avail. The main symptom was a hard hang and errors of this form:

ata4 command 0x25 timeout, stat 0x50 host_stat 0x24 ata4 command 0x35 timeout, stat 0x50 host_stat 0x24

Yep, that's what I'm seeing too, with the odd ata3 timeout mixed in. Great to have the problem confirmed - thanks.

Sometimes the machine would recover after a long wait, other times nothing but a power cycle would fix it. This was with the 1.01 and 1.02 Tyan bioses.

Installing a SCSI card and an old SCSI disk in the machine made it happier, but slower.

As a last resort before installing a different distribution, I downloaded the 2.6.15.6 kernel source and using the .config file as a base, I added everything I could find related to SATA and SCSI. I had to compile it on an nfs-mounted drive, for fear of tickling the host_stat error. The new home-spun kernel has been a success; I haven't seen the errors since. I then installed the 2.6.16 kernel compiled locally and still no errors.

The machine hasn't been tested thoroughly, but it is most certainly usable with a newer kernel.

Which matches my experience of SuSE10 working fine on the same MB, with a (SuSE-patched) 2.6.13 kernel.

Thanks much, Gavin

On Fri, 31 Mar 2006 at 6:08am, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote

I've been running x86_64 centos-4 on one (with a plain SATA disk) for a while now with no problems whatsoever. dmidecode says the BIOS date is 6/7/05 --

Replying to myself, it looks like I'm running the 1.01 BIOS. Heh. So maybe *downgrading* your BIOS would help.