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