Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 380231
F8 (and later updates of F7) will not boot/install on Abit An52 motherboard
Last modified: 2007-12-04 15:52:47 EST
I've got an Abit An52 motherboard with the latest (2007/08/02) BIOS installed. It's got three SATA drives, using the internal SATA controllers and four PATA drives, using a cheap ATA raid card to connect those to. DVD drive is on the built-in PATA connector. It boots off the first SATA drive. The only options the BIOS has related to the mode that the SATA controllers use gives you the choice of IDE and RAID, and I have the computer in IDE mode, but RAID mode doesn't change anything. The computer runs fine on Fedora 7, which it currently has installed, running 2.6.21-1.3194.fc7. However, this is the last kernel that has worked -- 2.6.22.9-91.fc7 and 2.6.23.1-10.fc7 fail to boot, as it loads the kernel and then can't access the (SATA) disk and panics. It does hang a long time during boot as it tries to access each SATA disk, printing messages such as -- `qc timeout' `failed to IDENTIFY' `port is slow to respond, please be patient'. With the F8 x86_64 disk, it spends a very long time trying to load the ahci driver and doesn't find the disk and eventually says it can't find a disk to install on (which surprises me, it ought to at least find the Promise 100TX2 raid card and it's drives, though I don't want to install on them.) The computer does not have a serial port (grrr!) so I can't easily capture the kernel output. Perhaps via a live CD, if I need to try that. I have included a bunch of information (dmesg, lsmod, lspci, etc.) collected under the 2.6.21-1.3194.fc7 kernel -- which is the one that works. I've looked online for other reports of the same problem, and really haven't found anything -- which surprises me. The most useful looking thing I found was this at forum.abit-usa.com/showthread.php?p=873072 -- I think I know what's going on here, the drivers labeled 'sata-ide' in nforce520 (mcp65) package are actually for an AHCI controller, with device_id 044D. Even though an52 specs show it as an nforce520 board, the sata chip (or atleast the bios) doesn't support AHCI, only Raid (044C) & Ide (045D) modes . One might confuse sata-ide mode for ahci (as I did) but really this is just Legacy IDE emulation, with no support for sata features like only UDMA-5 (100MB/s instead of ~300MB/s ), no NCQ, no hotplug, etc, etc. Needless to say, this is awful. I wonder, does Abit have any NForce 5 mboard supporting ahci/sata-ide, or are they all crippled like this one ? ... but I don't know if that's relevant or not. Either way, older kernels do work just fine, and the SATA drives even performs well.
Created attachment 256981 [details] dmesg, lsmod, lspci, etc. output from the last _working_ kernel.
The computer and currently working kernel also seems to have the issue mentioned in buzilla 247353, but so far it seems completely harmless -- it's had it for months and it seems to have no ill effects.
Adding `pci=nomsi' to the kernel options seems to have made the later F7 kernels work. I'll try it with the F8 install DVD soon ...
And pci=nomsi worked for installing F8 too. So this can probably be marked as resolved.
Works with pci=nomsi workaround.