Mark Stodola wrote:
> Troy Dawson wrote:
>> J S Jayakumar wrote:
>>> Dear All,
>>>
>>>           I was trying to install SL5.2 on an ASUS M3N78-EM 
>>> <http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=149&l3=676&l4=0&model=2319&modelmenu=1>   
>>> mother board with has NVIDIA GeForce 8300 chipset.  During the 
>>> installation, it fails to recognise the SATA hard disk controller 
>>> and aborts the installation with the message that No hard disk is 
>>> found.  Can you pl. suggest a solution to this problem?
>>>
>>> J S Jayakumar
>>
>> Step 1 - Convince Nvidia that closed sourced drivers make it really 
>> hard to do an initial install.
>> Step 2 - Use those open source drivers that they provide
>> Step 3 - wake up because step 1 is going to take a few more years.
>>
>> Or were you wanting a more immediate solution :)
>>
>> I don't have an nvidia based chipset, so I'm going off of memory, 
>> maybe someone can correct me if I'm wrong.
>>
>> One thing to try is to change the setting in the bios from SATA Raid 
>> to SATA IDE (or whatever it isn't right now, change it to the other 
>> setting)
>>
>> I think another thing to try is to pass the noapic option when you 
>> start, so it would be something like
>>   linux noapic
>>
>> I'm also not sure of this one, but there is a SATA driver that 
>> doesn't like to be loaded after the USB driver, so you have to do a
>>   linux nousb
>> But that only works if you have a keyboard that isn't USB.
>>
>> Troy
>>
> I've been playing with ddiskit lately, if there is a compilable 
> driver, you could use that to generate a Driver Update Disk to insert 
> during installation.  I can help you if you are having trouble.
>
> I also don't have an nvidia chipset here to test.  I doubt the noapic 
> is going to help much, as it seems to be a lack of driver and not an 
> interrupt related issue.  You could try 'linux all-generic-ide' as 
> well though.  I've had very good luck with this getting SL to 
> recognize newer controllers as generic IDE.  It is now standard boot 
> option for the livecds I generate.
>
> Good luck,
> Mark
>
I could successfully install OpenSUSE x86_64 ver 11.0 in the machine 
with the latest ASUS motherboad ASUS M3N78-EM which  has the NVIDIA 
GeForce 8300 chipset.  No problems, the machine is up and running.  So 
we need the required drivers to be put in the SL distribution.

J S Jayakumar