Mr N

I bought one of those Ubuntu PC’s that Dell are selling. It is the only PC Dell sell where you don’t have to pay Micro$oft tax. Ubuntu is fine for a desktop but this was going to be a server. So popped on Fedora Core 8.

I added another bigger hard drive and noticed that there are only 2 drive bays and 2 5 1/4″ drive bays which is ok for a desktop but not great if you want to load it with massive hard drives!

I booted the PC and it went straight into booting the Ubuntu. It did not even notice that there was a bootable DVD in the drive. So restarted the PC and went into the BIOS. Not bad - the BIOS lets you just boot from a different device without having to set it to permanently check the optical drives.

Graphical menu popped up and I selected the Install Fedora Core 8. It started loading drivers. The second driver I tried to load hung the machine. It sticks on “loading ata_piix driver…". Took a while to find a reference to the problem but it looks like it has been happending since Fedora Core 4! Here is the snippet from the Fedora Forum:

Some older motherboards tend to opt for the cheap way of piggy backing the sata/ide ICH6 channels on the same channel as the IDE/SCSI channels. When the ata_piix module tries to read the storage on these channels it throws a wobbly.

Try changing your sata ports to the last 2 on the motherboard, usually sata port 4 or 5 / 6 or 7. These two are usually the only 2 that are dedicated ICH6 ports.

Motherboards that are affected are ASUS running JMicron and others with the same chipsets.

Changed the SATA connections on the motherboard from 1 & 2 (for HDD 1 & 2) and 3 (for DVD) to DVD on 2 and the HDD’s on 4 & 5. Rebooted again. Hurray that huddle was over.

After that most things seemed to work ok.