I am building a new Linux box at work an ran into a few problems. The
computer is a AMD K6-333 processor with a gigabyte motherboard that has a
ALI 15xx chipset a ATI All In Wonder Pro Video card, 128 meg of Ram a cdrom
drive, and 3 LinkSys networking cards, and a 27 Gig Maxtor hard drive that
is brand new never been in a windows PC. This system will not have anything
on it but Linux. The bios doe support the full size of the drive and I have
tried it in both LBA mode and Normal.
My problem was that during the install when I got to setting up partitions
I made a 50 meg "/boot" partition first and then a 120 meg swap partition
and then split the remaining space in a "/", "/home", "/usr", and a "/var"
saved and exited disk druid. The first thing I was told was that I did not
have a swap partition and offered to let me go back I tried to go back and
check it but disk druid and fdisk said it could not read the partition table
and file not found. I even tried Alt F2 to get to a console and fdisk it but
it wouldn't recognize it either. I then tried a win 98 boot disk and the
fdisk on it saw that I had 2 partitions a 50 meg NON DOS and a extended
partition that was marked as dos It let me delete the non dos partition. I
finally used the maxtor boot disk that came with the drive to make an all
DOS partition the first thing it told me was it did not recognize the
partition type but did let me create 1 large Dos partition. Which I was
then able to delete with DOS fdisk and start the install again.
I tried the above several times with the exact same results. Finally I used
fdisk instead of Disk Druid created the same number of partitions and
everything went smooth. Linux now sees the whole drive and I completed the
install. I assume the problem is with Disk Druid being that fdisk worked.
On My network I just selected NE2000 PCI and it recognized and set them up
no problems there also no problems with my video.
The system is now up and operating. I do have one minor problem though.
Linux doesn't seem to support the ALI 15xx chipset for the IDE controller it
says unknown IDE type and won't let me use UDMA or DMA mode. Does anyone
know if there is a patch or anything I can do to get it to work in DMA or
UDMA or do I need to buy a new mother board?
I know most of what I typed here is not relevant to my problem just thought
my experiences might help some one else.
Ken Hughes
