Hi,
Here's what I spent my weekend doing at home:
I'm trying to install SL 4.1 (or 4.2 rc2?3, same results) on a system 
that is already running Fedora Core 1.

The system has 4 60GB IDE HD's set up as a couple raid 1 arrays for /usr 
and /var and a big raid 5 array.

When I run the installer I get errors about DMA timeouts and when it 
eventually times out and gets to the partitioning screen, its missing 1 
of the drives, and even weirder, the raid1 devices that were on both 
that drive and another drive it does see are missing as well.

I though the problem might be the VIA chipset built in the motherboard, 
so I switched to a couple ide PCI cards I had lying around.  The drives 
are currently running off:

IDE interface: CMD Technology Inc PCI0649 (rev 02)
Unknown mass storage controller: Promise Technology, Inc. 20267 (rev 02)

although swapping controllers made no difference in symptoms.

I thought the problem might be following one of the drives, which it 
seemed to when swapping things around, however when i tried installing 
with the suspect drive removed, which shouldn't matter in this setup, I 
got the same symptoms.

I tried running the installer with an ide=nodma option, and that 
resulted in a kernel panic where it usually gets the dma errors.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

-kevin

-- 
Kevin M. Hill       http://home.fnal.gov/~kevinh/
CD/CSS/CSI	         http://www-csi.fnal.gov/
Fermilab	             http://www.fnal.gov/