While trying to get my new wide-screen monitor up, I thought "well,
I'll just boot the live Fedora 8 and see what it does".
The hardware under consideration is a Dell PowerEdge 400SC, with a
2.8GHz P4, 3.0GB RAM, and assorted disk drives. The motherboard has
two SATA channels, and two IDE channels. On SATA 0 I have a 160GB
Maxtor IDE drive with a SATA dongle (sda). This has been working well
for almost the whole life of the computjer. On SATA 1, I have a 500MB
Maxtor SATA drive (sdb). On the second IDE channel I have a CD-DVD RW
drive as master (hdc). So much for the hardware background.
I tried to boot a variety of live CDs, with generally bad results.
Fedora 8, Fedora 7, Ubuntu 7.10 all fail essentially the same way:
the inital boot from the CD is OK but then they can't find the CD
drive to do anything else. Messages like "ata 3.00 failed toset
xfermode" " ata3 port failed to respond" "Can not find root file
system"
Booting Knoppix-type disks, such as Knoppix 5.1.1 and DamnSmall Linux
3.4 both act the same: Splash screen, then two penguins, and no other
visible progress ever. Looks like it stops being able to read the CD
but has no way to complain.
On the other hand, booting the Fedora 8 installation DVD does its
thing for a while, reads from the DVD just fine, but when it comes to
configuring drives, it does not see SATA0. Only SATA1.
I am confused. My upgrade plan for this computer is to replace the
IDE and dongle with a genuine SATA drive, and do a clean install on
that. Then I will put the old drive in a USB box and transfer
whatever seems useful. Now I worry some about being able to boot the
installer. :-(
Meanwhile, the system works just fine booted from its pseudo-SATA drive 0.
carl
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carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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