[CentOS] Centos 4 on Tyan S2895 with sata

Fri Mar 31 00:03:22 UTC 2006
Chris Mauritz <chrism at imntv.com>

Gavin Carr wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> 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.
>
> Any success stories out there?
>   

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?

The good news is that once it works, the system is VERY fast.  I've got 
dual Opteron 270's and 275's in ours and am quite pleased with the speed 
for doing mostly disk and cpu-intensive video encoding/editing.  I 
suspect they'd be great for inexpensive database boxen.

If you have any other questions, feel free to give me a shout.

Cheers,