Topic: Biostar Motherboard Yields Problem Installing SME?

[york]

Hello Everyone,

Please allow me if someone asked the same question before, but last time I search Contribs I couldn't find anything that yields an answer to my problem so here I am posting on the forums.  Hopefully you can give me a hand on this ...

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I just purchased a new low-end PC to play with SME.  However the installer hangs when it gets to the line:

ehci-hcd 00:10.4: PCI device 1106: 3104

I tried to install the following and gets different results:

1. SME 6.01 -> hangs at the "ehci-hcd ..." line

2. SME 5.6 -> hangs at "anaconda" text screen

3. RH9 -> same as 6.01

4. Mandrake 9.1 -> successful

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My questions are:

A. Why can't I install SME (or RH for that matter, since they are from the same root) but Mandrake installed o.k.?

B. What can I do to get around the "ehci-hcd ..." error in order to successfully install SME onto the box?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

York

P.S.: I suspect that it is the mobo (Biostar U8668-D) but not 100% sure and certain I don't know Linux/SME enough to fix it.

[york]

Hello Everyone,

Here's the latest development and am wondering if anyone can give me a hand on this:

Thinking this may be the USB, I spent some money to get a set of PS/2 KB/Mouse for the Biostar machine.  Surely trashing the Mandrake 9.1 (remember, I was able to install Mandrake but not SME/RH earlier) I was able to install SME.

However upon the 1st reboot after the initial installation phase, I recieved a Kernel Panic.  Upon checking this site the only thing I can find are all SATA related - but I am not running SATA.

Call Trace:
  probe_hwif
  ideprobe_init
  stext
  init
  stext
  arch_kernel_thread
  init

Can anyone point me to the right direction in solving this problem?  Thanks in advance.

Regards,

York
/YC:yc

[york]

Hello Everyone,

Digging deeper into this Biostar Motherboard mess I discovered that:

1. Other RH and related distos all failed in the same way.

2. SME v7 Beta 8 works fine.

My question remains: Why?

Can anyone please offer me an insight on this?  Thank you very much.

York
/YC:yc

[MSmith]

Can't really help you with "why" ... I'm sure there's some subtle hardware incompatibility or bug in a RedHat driver.  SME 7 is based on CentOS/RH Enterprise Linux so it's a different animal altogether, really.

Unfortunately, given that it's just one motherboard I'm not sure you're going to get a definite answer on "why" unless you perform some more testing yourself and post on a more RedHat-specific forum or forums.  Since I don't have this motherboard I can't experiment with it.

[york]

Hello M. Smith,

Thanks for the reply.  Actually HW driver is sort of what I expected to hear, but I was hoping that someone may have used this mobo and will be able to point me to a fix, in one form or another, that I can use 6.01 or 6.5 on my machine ...

I guess if I can't use 6.01 or 6.5, then I'll join the beta gang to play with 7.0 and see how this new version goes.

Thanks again and have a wonderful weekend.

Regards,

York
/YC:yc

[cjsstables]

Check and make sure that your HD (most likely a high speed ulta ata drive) and your ATAPI drive are compatible speed wise with each other if they both reside on the same IDE/EIDE cable /channel and set up as master and slave.  If they arn't speed compatible, you will find many linux distros failing to install because of DMA conflicts.  

I'm not speaking about SME per say, but I have spent many hours installing other linux distros that fail....  ie RED HAT.  I found that the kernel hangs when trying to access one device and then the other.  I had a very similar problem when I went out and got two 300 gig seagates and couldn't get them to run.  So, I started researching the web on seagates and found in a technical bulletin that their high speed drives don't play nicely with ATAPI drives on the same channel due to DMA conflicts.  

Seagate recommended to place an additional jumper on their drive.  ( I think this lowers the ata speed) but the way I resolved it was just to make sure that I put my ATAPIs on one channel and the ultra ata drives on the other.  I haven't had any install issues since then.

Hope this helps you out.