Hi, recently I tried to install Suse v9.1-AMD64 on my Athlon64 machine with an MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R (MS-6702) board. [Kernel was updated to 2.6.4-54.5] To make the story short: During various stages (after finishing the installation and trying to fix issues like an incorrectly formatted swap partition), I had my only SATA drive connected to either of the two SATA controllers (and always the other one disabled). Still I encountered many complete system freezes and recently mainly kernel oopses, which - as far as I can tell - were related to either access to the SATA HDD or a PATA device on the VT8237 controller. Even though I can finally boot the system, strangely yast2 is broken in a way that I get "import 'SCR' failed" errors. [I was only fiddling with modules.dep and initrd.] Unless you have a better idea, I have now made up my mind that I should take the windows approach and format-and-reinstall Suse9.1. But before I start with that and run into the same problems: Can you recommend to me which of the IDE controllers I should use? Which one has the most stable amd64 kernel modules? Or should I consider patching the kernel (for a recent sata_via patch see also: http://lwn.net/Articles/76129/ ) - or possibly using a kraxel kernel? Would system stability increase if I switched to a 32-bit kernel? Maybe the SATA controllers are not the problem? Any hints would be greatly appreciated. best regards, Jan P.S.: On the Via VT8237 my SATA hdd is now recognized as /dev/hda. Should it not be /dev/sda as on the Promise? PPS: When I got the system to run after switching the SATA drive from Promise to VT8237, the hardware autorecognition feature offered me to add the sata_via module to initrd. I said 'yes' and my initrd got screwed in a way that I could not boot anymore. It took me quite a while to recreate a workable initrd - and still I got error messages that mkinitrd could not check the dependencies in modules.dep for sata_via. Maybe something is wrong with the mkinitrd script? PPPPS. I also have a recent NVidia based graphic card, which takes an AGP aperture of 128MB. Running the suse install CD in rescue mode, I noticed that a module called nvram was loaded - what is that for? -- "Sie haben neue Mails!" - Die GMX Toolbar informiert Sie beim Surfen! Jetzt aktivieren unter http://www.gmx.net/info