[svlug] SuSE-9.2 installation on Dell Precision 470 with Intel E7525 chipset and SATA

[Karen Shaeffer]

On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 06:10:45PM -0800, Roland Krause wrote:
> Hi All,
> I am trying to install SuSE Professional 9.2 on a Dell Precision 470
> with an Intel E7525 chipset. The problem is that the installation
> process fails to recognize the SATA drive. I have only one Seagate
> 250Gig SATA drive in this machine. I have tried loading different SATA
> kernel modules at random but there seems no driver for this particular 
> controller which seem to be an Intel controller (afaict). 
> 
> Has anybody succeeded with something similar? 
> 
> Any pointers to where I can find a driver that I can load during the
> installation? I hear that newer kernels have better support for this
> hardware but I haven't seen how to use a newer kernel for the
> installation process. 
> 
> Any hints are greatly appreciated. 
> 
> Roland

Hi Roland,

I don't know that much about Suse. But SATA is very well supported on
current 2.6.x kernels. This includes intel.

If you have a CD burner on a working system, then you can just
grab a newer kernel, compile it, and insert in the CD boot
directory, and then reburn it as a bootable CD. This is quite
easy to accomplish.

All installers use syslinux these days. You can read about it
rather quickly.

Find the directory that has the files "isolinux.bin" and
"isolinux.cfg" in it, as well as a ramdisk and also a kernel.

Just replace the kernel with your newly compiled upgraded kernel.
If you compile it all statically, then you don't even have to
unroll the ramdisk. Otherwise you'll need to unroll the ramdisk
and insert your new modules in there as well, finally rolling
it back up as a ramdisk. Then reburn a bootable CD.

It easy and fun. (smiles ;) Let us know about the results, if
you try this.

HTH,
Karen
-- 
 Karen Shaeffer
 Neuralscape, Palo Alto, Ca. 94306
 shaeffer at neuralscape.com  http://www.neuralscape.com