64-bit FC3 on nForce4 motherboards

[Brian Stretch]

Brian Stretch wrote:

 >> Has anyone successfully migrated a 64-bit FC3 machine to a nForce4
 >> chipset (PCI-Express) motherboard? I get a kernel panic very quickly
 >> during bootup, right after it fails to mount the drives (boot drive
 >> is Serial ATA, nForce controller). There are two PCI errors too. The
 >> weird thing is that I can boot linux rescue off the FC3 DVD and read
 >> my drives just fine. I had to move my HDs back to my old system to
 >> get online so I'm hoping someone can at least tell me if they have
 >> successfully run FC3 on a nForce4 chipset system.
 >
 > Maybe an issue with fstab?? What's the chipset on the nForce...
 > Silicon Image??? In that case, FC kernels have a MAJOR flaw: they
 > include both the drivers there are for it ATA and SATA... This is
 > wrong because these two drivers are MUTUALLY exclusive. I haven't
 > known a single FC official kernel that properly supports SII 311x
 > controller. One reason to build your own.

The nForce4 chipset provides its own SATA controller.  The Neo4 does 
have a Silicon Image SATA controller in addition to that but I have it 
disabled in the BIOS (there is no hardware jumper to disable it).  The 
rescue DVD mentions loading a sata_nv driver or something like that.

I could try enabling the Silicon Image controller and moving the drive 
to that, but I'm not sure that's wise?

I also have an IDE drive plugged in... hmm, could that be causing 
problems?  In my old system the SATA drive was on a Promise controller 
and the IDE on a VIA chipset controller.