SOLVED Some LiveCD Issues With P35+ICH9R Mobo.

[Old_Biker_John]

Hi Everybody,:hiya:

I spent the last week following the advice to "try a few LiveCDs" given by a few experienced Linux users in this (http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=744336) thread and came across one or two problems that initially prevented me from running them on my newly-built system.

I list the main facts here in the hope that they may assist other 'newbies' in trying Linux on their modern desktop PC's.

My system has all SATA drives (ICH9R ports set at 'IDE' mode and JMicron 363 ports set at 'AHCI+IDE').

My Pioneer DVR 215 DVD R/W drive is on the 2nd. ICH9R port (boot HDD is on 1st. port). The DVD R/W was not found by the distro's that I tried when they attempted to load the Linux Kernel from their CD/DVD despite their having read it correctly to allow me to choose options from their boot menus. I haven't yet tried swapping the ports for the DVD R/W and HDD.

Ubuntu 8.04 release (32 bit and 64 bit) both failed in this way, leaving me with a message about BusyBox, followed on a new line by (initramfs) and then a series of lines testing ata2, ata4, ata5, etc. as follows: -

[ 529.497360] ata5.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
[ 529.497469] ata5.00: cmd a0/00:00:00:24:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 pio 36 in
[ 529.497575] ata5.00: status: [ DRDY ]
[ 529.989316] ata5: WARNING: synchronous SCSI scan failed without making any progress,

After a bit of searching around I found reference to this information in a Linux help forum: -

"For distros that don't see your SATA drive, use these boot options:
all-generic-ide pci=nommconf acpo=off irqpoll"

Both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Ubuntu 8.04 LiveCD booted successfully with "all-generic-ide irqpoll" inserted in the boot options command line so I am now able to explore the Ubuntu distro's features.:)

The same options allowed me to boot and install a Mandriva Powerpack 2008 DVD with ease. I am posting this thread from that distro at the moment.:)

The two options used above did not overcome a boot-up issue with PCLOS 2008 Gnome, as this still stalls with the message "Searching for the loop image" and indicating /dev/sdb instead of /dev/scd0 as I expected. More experimentation is required to solve this one.:(

There were LiveCDs for other distro's. e.g. Bluewhite64 and Dreamlinux that booted quite happily with no problem reading my SATA optical drives.:thumbsup:

I hope that this information saves a few potential Linux converts from sleepless nights and hair loss.

My thanks again to all who helped me to start enjoying the world of Linux over the last few weeks.:clap:

John.

[Ikki]

Hmm...

I run Ubuntu on an MSI NEO2-FR board (P35 and ICH9R) with SATA drives and haven't had any problems with both 7.10 and 8.04LTS. In fact, I have tried lots of other distros too in both live CD and HD install and all have worked well with one exception, the KDE version of Fedora 9 and it wasn't a drive issue there (the Gnome version worked without problems).

Could it be something else specific to your system that is causing these problems for you?

[Old_Biker_John]

Hi Ikki,

Thanks for posting your observations.:)

Hmm...

I run Ubuntu on an MSI NEO2-FR board (P35 and ICH9R) with SATA drives and haven't had any problems with both 7.10 and 8.04LTS. In fact, I have tried lots of other distros too in both live CD and HD install and all have worked well with one exception, the KDE version of Fedora 9 and it wasn't a drive issue there (the Gnome version worked without problems).

As I reported in my last post ( I buried it just after listing the problem with booting Ubuntu 8.04:)) Both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Ubuntu 8.04 LiveCD booted successfully with "all-generic-ide irqpoll" inserted in the boot options command line so I was able to explore the Ubuntu distro's features.

A recent experiment has shown that I can reduce this to only 'irqpoll' to produce a successful boot-up. This also works for Ubuntu 7.10 LTS.

I had the same Ubuntu 8.04 boot-up failure when trying to use the Wubi installation in windows. (I haven't bothered to retry Wubi to see if the LiveCD fix works there as well, but I would expect it to).

PCLOS 2008 Gnome is now the only distro, of those I have recently tried, which fails to find the loop image. It searched on my 2nd. HDD (which it identified correctly as /dev/sdb), but completely ignored the optical drive that it had initially used (as /dev/scd0) to start the LiveCD and offer me a boot menu!:(

Since I started this thread, I have uninstalled Mandriva Powerpack 2008. (It wanted exclusive rights to the master boot record of my hard drive, making it difficult for me to try other distros!)

I am now using grub (leaving the MBR to Windows) to multi-boot the following installations, with no issues so far: -

Windows 2000 Pro., 32-bit Windows XP Pro. (still SP2!), Bluewhite64 12.1 (I liked the 12.0 LiveCD so much that I installed 12.1 without waiting for the, now released, LiveCD), Dreamlinux 3.3 and Ultimate Edition 1.8 (an X64 Ubuntu Hardy Heron-based distro).

Fedora 9 Gnome LiveCD boots OK and this distro is about to be added after I have completed installing Mint 4.0 (still undecided on 5.0).

Could it be something else specific to your system that is causing these problems for you?

My current thoughts on the hardware detection issues are that some distro's are better than others at recognising the existence ofthe two (ICH9R and JMicron JMB 363) SATA controllers on my motherboard. I have heard that some users have been successful in booting with an IDE optical drive on their JMB363 port, but I use a SATA optical drive on port 2 of my ICH9R, which may be confusing the hardware detection software.

I will continue to initially try the 'irqpoll' boot parameter with troublesome distros, only adding other options if the distro fails to find it's image file.

I should add that PCLOS 2008 Gnome works perfectly on an old Abit NF7 motherboard that I still use. It just gets confused with the latest addition to my computer collection.

John.