Hi all, I have a new machine (with an AMD64 processor) with a Maxtor SATA drive and I'm having some difficulty with installing Debian. I'm PXE-booting the 2.6-series kernel i386 net-installer using the latest daily build (as of yesterday).
The first problem I have is the sata module isn't installed, so the kernel doesn't see any disks. The sata-modules-2.6... udeb is installed, but the installer never does "modprobe sata_nv". I can work around this by doing the modprobe on the console and restarting the installer at the "detect disks" section. For the partitioning I choose "guided partitioning", erasing the disk, and the multiple partitions option (/, /usr, /home, /var, swap, etc). Second problem is that after the formatting happens, the swap space is loaded (via swapon, I guess), but somehow the installer thinks this action failed. The kernel notes the additional swap space, but (iirc) this happens before the formatting of the ext3 filesystems. One possible explanation is that the installer does swapon before formatting the ext3 partitions, then tries to do swapon a second time after. I haven't done enough investigation to say for certain, though. The final problem is that occasionally the drive locks up with the following kernel error: ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0x9F7 The problem seems to persist over resets and requires a power-cycle before going away. This looks to me like a bug in the sata_nv driver (Google was not illuminating), but I mention it here can shed any light on this. Cheers, Paul.
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