NFORCE3-SATA & Linux

[greffov]

Hey folks, I just figured out something plain stupid, but I thought I'd share in case someone runs into the same problem.

Ok, I wanted to install Linux on a brand net AMD Athlon64 3000+ machine on a nForce3 mobo with a SATA disk attached to it. All went fine while building the PC, then I inserted the livecd of my favourite Linux distribution, Gentoo, to boot the beast. This just went well, so no problem. Of course the network card wasn't found, but since it was an nForce thing, that was no biggy, as Linux has splendid support for that once it is installed. However, my SATA harddisk was NOT being recognised! So, how do you install on a system where the disk is not there?!?

I tried manually loading the brand new sata_nv module, which should be THE module to load as it would support the nVidia nForce SATA controller. However, my system just hung on that. Ohw well... there went some nose hair. After a lot of rebooting, adjusting BIOS settings and eventually screwing up the BIOS so I had to reset it using the well-known jumper, I decided to go googling. I didn't know exactly what for, but I decided just to go and read whatever I could find. No real solutions I could find, apart from solutions which seemed not to be applicable to me.

So I thought maybe I should install the latest BIOS software thing, by flashing it. Not the funniest thing you want to do, but ok, why not, I had nothing to lose! I was completely baffled to see that my old Win98 bootdisk could 'see' a harddisk! Ok, it only say 52 meg of a 120 Gig disk, but at least it did manage to do something with the disk! This is where I lost my mind, but I decided just to continue flashing the bios. Well, after this, Linux still didn't find any disks. Bah!

I decided to leave it alone for a while. I was so angry that it just didn't work!!! Anyway, after a while just simply thinking it over, I remembered that I read somewhere that some people reported that it 'used to work with the old now deprecated drivers' and combined that with the win98 bootdisk. This gave me somehow the impression that the 2.6.9 kernel that came with my Linux livecd maybe was too new, and so I took some old dusted RedHat Linux 7.2 cdroms and fed them to the beast... I was astounded as well as filled with enlightnment: it found the disk, just as simple as it could be.

Final story: the 2.6.5 kernel of Linux comes by default with an older SATA driver, which DOES work with nForce3 SATA 250Gb. After I installed the system without any problems from an older livecd, I just upgraded the kernel and compiled the older SATA driver into it, so the system now works happily and without problems.

Maybe this can help others (and save them some nose hair )

[lucius]

Hi!
I've got same problem with my k8n motherboard. The sata_nv module just won't do with the livecd 2004.3 . Isn't it possible to download the older module and use it with the new livecd?

/L

[greffov]

I don't think so, as that module is not compiled for the 2004.3 kernel.

Someone suggested to try this (maybe it works)

when starting installation from Live or universal CD do next:

boot: gentoo doataraid noapic

and when the system starts

livecdroot#modprobe sata_nv

after this your drives should be recognized as /dev/sda ...

[lucius]

Ok. Thanks for that. I'll try it right away. I've seen other solutions involving modification of the nv_sata.c file, but I'll stick to your solution if it works.

I've tried for several evenings to get this Gentoo-thing to work. I hope i'll succed tonight...

/Lucius

[greffov]

good luck! Once your Gentoo install settles, it becomes a delight to use.