On Fri Mar 31 09:39:24 AM, 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? 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 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. Cheers, Zube