[CentOS] Installing CentOS 2.1 on ICH7R controller

Thu Sep 28 16:16:28 UTC 2006
Aleksandar Milivojevic <alex at milivojevic.org>

I'm trying to install CentOS 2.1 on SATA drive that lives on ICH7R  
controller.  I have the controller setup in BIOS to "compatibility"  
mode, which means it should look just like regular IDE controller to  
the OS.  In this mode, ide0 and ide1 are PATA controllers, and 4 SATA  
ports are mapped to ide2 and ide3.

If I boot from the 2.1 installation CD, all the drives are detected  
(CD-ROM as hda, and four SATA drives as hde, hdf, hdg, and hdh, just  
as expecte per above mappings).  It detect IRQ for ide2/3 right away,  
and says it will probe for IRQ for ide0 later.  Well, it hangs just  
after it probes and detects IRQ for ide0.  I've tried all bunch of  
"standard" kernel options (turnning off DMA, disabling ACPI, and so  
forth), none of which helped.

If I install the OS on some other box (with older SATA controller),  
update the kernel to 2.4.9-e.70, move the disk to the new box, the  
kernel boots just fine (however, the initrd image points to the wrong  
root device -- and I can't really boot into rescue to fix it, since  
kernel on install CD will hang).  Hence I attempted to rebuild 2.1  
install CD with 2.4.9-e.70 kernel (which I haven't managed to do yet).

I also attempted to use CentOS 3.8 CD in rescue mode.  However,  
regardless of my BIOS settings, it loads ata_piix drivers, and uses  
the controller in SATA mode, which isn't really what I want (mkinitrd  
trying to be too smart, but I have couple of tricks to try yet).  I'm  
currently attempting to force it into PATA emulation mode by supplying  
"ide2=io1,io2,irq and ide3=io1,io2,irq" parameters, and it is going  
*very* slow and constantly complaining about lost interrupts.

Anyhow, if anybody has some advice with getting this 2.1 install  
going, it would be very appreciated.

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