In the test lab we have an Asus SV7 motherboard that has an onboard Promise ATA100 controller chip. The motherboard has 2 standard IDE slots and 2 Promise slots. connected to the primary Promise slot was a Maxtor 40GB ATA66 IDE drive. The Promise bios screen properly detects the hard disk. During the first stage installer when the newt window comes up showing Loading IDE modules... the machine hard freezes and has to be reset. With the same configuration except with the maxtor drive plugged into the standard IDE port, it continues on with the install properly. Note: Promise controller states no BIOS support is installed when it does not detect any drives connected to it. I will try it with a drive connected to the primary of both the standard and Promise interfaces. Although I suspect the same thing will happen.
I've seen the same behavior. What is even more strange is if you install a system w/o the drive attached to the ATA100 port, and then reboot it with the drive attached to the ATA100 port, you can go an format it, etc. Something about the order modules are installed perhaps? Most definately a kernel problem.
The system I can reproduce this on has a Asus A7V board with a 750MHZ Duron. The drive is a 20GB Seagate ATA II Barracuda.
This defect is considered MUST-FIX for Florence Gold release
Should be resolved by reverting modular IDE to static IDE. Turns out there are geometry problems with modular IDE...