In article <1200d901568qu82@corp.supernews.com>, thunderTAKEOUT@gti.net
says...
: On Sat, 25 Feb 2006 05:25:58 +0000, John wrote:
:
:
: > I looked up the Shuttle sn25p and it has the very same stuff on the
: > motherboard - nvidia nforce 4 with mcp. I noticed the bios is by Award
: > though - on my Asus A8N-VM CSM it is American Megatrends. The megatrend
: > bios refers to a "Winbond" io system. Could it be I have a "winmodem"
: > type motherboard?
:
: Winbond refers to Winbond Electronics. It's not a "winmodem" type.
:
: As for the SATA drive, do you know what kernel your installer is using?
: You are going to need a kernel with libata support. I'm a little hazy on
: the details but this link should get you going.
:
: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html
:

I am trying to install the from the first of the 14 disks in Sarge
3.1r1-i386-binary-1.iso. For the linux26 or expert26 choices the
kernel used by the installer is 2.6.8-1 I believe.

I have used "linux26" to start the installation. Just before the first
configuration screen (choose language?) I see the word "FATAL" flash by
on the screen, while in plain text mode.

I have tried all the available kernel options ie linux, linux26,
expert, expert26 plus expert26 noacpi nolapic. I have also switched
the bios setting referring to PNP operating system back and forth
between yes and no. (No means the bios configures all the irq's, yes
means this is left to the operating system).

Once I got to the first config screen, I pressed ctrl-alt-f2 and used
dmesg | more to try to find out what that FATAL message was referring
to, but it was not contained in the dmesg transcript. I also cd'd to
/var/log and did cat syslog | more but it wasn't shown there either.

dmesg | more had some interesting items though.

bios bug - local APIC #0 not detected
then later
ACPI revision 20040326
ACPI -0307 Error
then 4 messages referring to "bad character in ACPI name 43005350
then
ACPI Unable to load the System Description Tables.
then later
PCI BIOS passed non existent PCI Bus 0!
repeated 6 times
PCI BIOS passed non existent PCI Bus 4!
PCI BIOS passed non existent PCI Bus 0! (again)

I was able to install Slackware Linux 10.2 using the SATA.I kernel. I
then was able to configure a 2.6 kernel that was available on the
installation CD's from kernel source. Both these recognized the SATA
disk on my machine quite well. No ethernet was detected though. I was
able to get XOrg to run quite well in the 2.4 SATA.I installation but
in the 2.6 version the USB mouse would not work even though it was
properly configured. For X in both cases I used the vesa driver.

Not having ethernet working makes trying to resolve any issues a
difficult proposition and there seems to be a lot of broken pieces on
my machine. I think the proper word for the bios is "borked". I am
very curious why it is that windows has no problems with it but linux
does.

GRRR.