Dark Liquid

On Friday I finally managed to get our new in-house server working. Centos doesn’t like the p5VD2 motherboard from ASUS because it is using the JMB363 IDE/SATA controller. You can use either SATA or IDE – but not both at the same time. So installing from an IDE DVD drive onto a SATA harddrive is problematic at best.

First thing I did was look for tutorials/howtos. Turns out the problem is ‘well known’ (I wish someone had told me!) and you can ‘solve’ it by changing the boot prompt command to:

linux all-generic-ide pci=nommconf

but this disabled the DVD drive for me so I was screwed.

So, what I did was make sure the BIOS had set the chipset to IDE compatibility mode and then I booted with the above boot parameters and did a network install. I did this by copying the whole dvd contents to a folder on one of our local webservers and then going through the network installation setup screens which are fairly self-explanatory. All this went through fine but after getting the software installed (and updated) the DVD drive still didn’t work so I had to compile a new kernel.

I downloaded the 2.6.20.1 kernel, copied the .config from the current kernel across, did a make menuconfig and setup the sata stuff (I compiled it into the kernel instead of as a module, I didn’t want to deal with any more potential hassle) and voila! It all worked and I can use the DVD drive along side the harddrive. I was a little shocked to notice that the harddrive had switched dev file from hda to sda and the DVD drive had taken the place of hda, but it all worked and booted up fine so I was happy.