[CentOS] Installing CentOS 2.1 on ICH7R controller

Thu Sep 28 18:53:47 UTC 2006
Aleksandar Milivojevic <alex at milivojevic.org>

Quoting rado <rado at rivers-bend.com>:

> Alexandar, when you get your system up, if you run dmesg...does it show
> where it's picking the drive up?

Well, it's in the PATA emulation mode, so it picks it up as soon as  
kernel probes for IDE drives (no additional modules required).

Anyhow, I managed to get the initrd image fixed.  However, the system  
hangs at random places when accessing the drives (after all file  
systems are mounted).  So I guess CentOS 2.1 and ICH7R are not ment to  
be (at least on SuperMicro PDSMi motherboard).  It's probably some  
small bug in IDE driver -- SATA configured in PATA emulation mode  
should just work (worst case is it would work in PIO mode).  Unless  
Intel screwed up something bad in the chipset.

On the other hand, CentOS 3.8 runs fine on the same hardware with SATA  
in native mode (with AHCI disabled) so it might be an option too.   
However, it has some similar symptoms to CentOS 2.1 if I force it to  
PATA compatibility mode.

As a side note, CentOS 4.4 runs with AHCI enabled, and also seems to  
show some problems if I force system to PATA compatibility mode.   
Hmmm...

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