From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3b) Gecko/20030109 Description of problem: I have an ASUS P4S8X motherboard which has the SiS648 chipset. I have had some VERY odd problems and have narrowed it down to the SiS 648 ATA 133 controller (I have swapped power supplies, hard drives, and motherboards--changing motherboards is the only thing that fixes the bug) In all tests, I'm using an ATA/66+ cable (the one with denser wires). When I set aa ATA/66 drive as the master on the primary IDE, the installer will see the drive, attempt to install, and sometimes even succeed. When it fails, it is always during heavy activity, and the drive sounds like it powers down and back up again. When it's spinning again, Linux is locked up. When I set an ATA/100 drive as the master on the primary IDE, the installer will not even see that any drive is present. I have to go back to Red Hat 7.3 before I can get a version that sees the drive and will install. RedHat 7.3 repeatedly complains that the drive is busy, but if you click "ignore" enough times, you can install, with no apparent errors. (it will claim to be busy even if the hard drive is the only IDE drive in the system--I tested this with a SCSI CD) I included a link to a kernel-development message regarding recent changes to the SiS IDE code in the kernel. I don't follow or even pretend to understand this, but if this is an ongoing problem, it may be a helpful starting point. I have more information of the disk geometry, hdparm information, etc, if you need it. I'm not sure what can be different between an ATA/66 drive and an ATA/100 drive which would cause different results, but this may be a clue. The ATA/66 drive is a Seagate St330630A. The ATA/100 drive is a Maxtor 6Y060L0. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Use ATA/100 drive on Asus P4S8X motherboard 2. Run any Red Hat Linux setup 8.0 to current beta 3. Fail to see hard drive Actual Results: Hard drive is not present, according to the installer. Fdisk complains that /dev/hda is not present, and indeed there is nothing there in the filesystem. Expected Results: Installer should see the hard drive, fdisk should partition it. Additional info: I understand that this may just be a "compatibility issue". The failure is so ungraceful, however, that I thought you should know about it. Also, shouldn't there be a way to force the kernel to use some sort of "generic" IDE support? I was able to get absolutely ancient versions of Windows working on this system.
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