Ray Van Dolson wrote: > Hi all, we're trying to install CentOS 5.1 on a Sun Ultra 40. This is > an AMD-powered machine and we're using the x86_64 version of CentOS > 5.1. The machine is using the NVidia CK804 chipset and has SATA disks. > It also has 16GB's of memory which prompted us to upgrade the BIOS on > the machine from 1.1 to 1.6 per this (we also have the two quadro > cards): > > http://docs.sun.com/source/819-3954-18/index.html#0_37092 > > The install goes fine up until the installer is trying to format the > disks. Part of the way through it simply dies and pops up an error > saying that the installer couldn't format the LVM volume and we have to > reboot. > > An examination of dmesg output shows that there are many SATA errors > occuring at this point. Timeouts and such. > > After a reboot, the SATA drive no longer shows up -- not even in BIOS. > It's as if the formatting has instructed the drive to deactivate > itself. :) A hard reset and reseat of the drive in the SATA enclosure > brings it back again. > > First thought was that the slot or SATA port was bad, so we have moved > to others with the same result. > > Solaris 10 x86 installs perfectly on this machine, so I'm starting to > think that the sata_nv driver is to blame here. > > We're in the process of trying 32-bit CentOS 5.1 on the system just for > giggles, and may try Fedora 8 as well or RHEL 5.1 and use our paid > support to track this issue down, but thought I'd run it by everyone > here. > > Didn't see any existing issues in bugzilla.redhat.com or > bugs.centos.org. > > Any insights on this? > > I will get the exact error messages posted up here soon (output from > dmesg, etc). > > TIA, > Ray > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos Try booting while disabling ACPI and APIC. linux noapic noacpi at the boot menu. -- James A. Peltier Technical Director, RHCE SCIRF | GrUVi @ Simon Fraser University - Burnaby Campus Phone : 778-782-3610 Fax : 778-782-3045 Mobile : 778-840-6434 E-Mail : jpeltier at cs.sfu.ca Website : http://gruvi.cs.sfu.ca | http://scirf.cs.sfu.ca MSN : subatomic_spam at hotmail.com