I've bought a brand new Dell Dimension 8300 with a Serial-ATA drive. According to Windows I have an Intel 82801EB Ultra ATA Storage Container. I was going to install my existing copy of SuSE 9.0 on it, but the ICH5-SATA drivers used by the installer don't working. Using the safe setting (ide=nodma, apm=off, acpi=off) the system displays the usual boot up and then freezes. Below are the last lines it displays. From what I've seen on the net, the problem is that the ICH5 driver in 9.0 is in an early (and unreliable) revision and bails out. Using the normal settings less information is displayed and the system freezes after displaying the second "hdb: probing..." line. This is a kernel freeze I'm talking about. Stuff like [Shift]-[PgUp] doesn't work. It is not possible, as far as I can see, to switch to legacy PATA mode in the BIOS. So what I need to know is, will SuSE 9.1 do a better job of supporting this? Also there's the issue of buying the SuSE update CD. I paid for the first one in the hope of paying less for each successive upgrade. Can I install the Upgrade pack on a PC, which hasn't first got SuSE 9 installed on it? What limits are there with the update pack? Thanks for any advice -- Bryan Feeney ---------------------------------------------------- The last lines of the kernel output ----------------------------------------------------
Uniform Multi-Platorm E-IDE Driver Revision: 7.00-beta4-2.4 ide: assuming 33Mhz system bus speed for PIO modes, override with idebus=xx PIIX-4: IDE Controller at PCI slot 00:1f.1 PCI: Found IRQ 9 for device 00:1f.1 PCI: Sharing IRQ 9 with 00:1d.2 PCI: Sharing IRQ 9 with 00:1f.2 PIIX-4: chipset revision 2 PIIX-4: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later ide0: BM-DMA at 0xffa8-0xffaf, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:pio ICH5-SATA: IDE Controller at PCI slot 00:1f.2 PCI: Found IRQ 9 for device 00:1f.2 PCI: Sharing IRQ 9 with 00:1d.2 PCI: Sharing IRQ 9 with 00:1f.1 ICH5-SATA: chipset revision 2 ICH5-SATA: 100% native mode on irq 9 ide0: BM-DMA at 0xfea0-0xfea7, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio hda: ST3120026AS, ATA Disk Drive hdb: probing with STATUS(0x00) instead of ALTSTATUS(0x50) hdb: probing with STATUS(0x00) instead of ALTSTATUS(0x50) hdc: HL-DT-ST RW/DVD GCC-4481B ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM Drive ide0 at 0xfe00-0xfe07,0xfe12 on irq 9 ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15 hda: attached ide-disk driver