Topic: SME on ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 with SATA2 hard drive

[egerards]

Recently I moved my 'old' desktop to the position of Linux server. As the topic title already suggests, this system contains an ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 motherboard with an AMD 4200+ cpu and a 500GB Samsung SATA2 hard drive.

After playing a bit around with CentOS 5.1 (which went flawlessly), I decided to install SME 7.3 which worked fine on older hardware, however on this particular hardware I am running into some problems:

- SME seems to be unable to find the SATA2 hard drive. I am able to install SME on an older IDE hard drive. In the BIOS I set the SATA2 port to operate in IDE mode and I even tried SATA mode, but both modes simply don't work. I also tried to load a couple of drivers at the beginning of the install procedure, however no luck here either.
- The internal LAN card doesn't seem to be recognized as well. I did a quick install to an IDE drive and noticed there wasn't a working LAN device.

As the motherboard that I am using is relatively popular, I am curious if there are any people who managed to get SME running on this motherboard and especially in combination with an SATA2 drive.

All tips are welcome.

[Stefano]

After playing a bit around with CentOS 5.1 (which went flawlessly), I decided to install SME 7.3 which worked fine on older hardware, however on this particular hardware I am running into some problems:

Hi..

Sme 7.x is based on Centos 4.x.. Sme 8 is based on centos 5.x

so, try (at your own risk, it's a beta release) Sme 8

for other informations about your mb and centos 4, read the Centos hcl

Ciao
Stefano

[sal1504]

egerards

I have found that with most SataII hard drives and SME 7.X that I have had to jump the hard drive down to 150mbs from the default 3gbs. If you go to the manufactures website you can usually find specifications on the various jumper settings for that drive. Make the jumper change then try installing SME 7 and see what happens.

[egerards]

I found it a bit too early to install a beta1 release on a server that will eventually host several websites, do email and file serving and so on, so I will wait to install SME 8 until there is at least a release candidate.

The last tip from sal1504 appeared to be very valuable: I switched the SATA2 drive from the SATA2 port to a SATA1 port (this motherboard has 1 SATA2 port and 2 SATA1 ports). Last but not least I added a 3COM NIC to the system and the install went fine!