Centos 4.0 on SC440 SATA

[Ray Van Dolson]

I'm not sure that I can help you, but do have some questions on your approach
as I recently was trying to add driver support for an unsupported chipset
(ICH8 in a Dimension 9200).

> I am trying to get this OS installed on this server.  The distro CD of course does 
> not recognize the SATA controller.  My assumptions (right or wrong) are:
> 
> 1.  I need the ata_piix driver found on the Server Installation CD.
> 
> 2.  I create a driver diskette by dd'ing the ata_piix-1.02c-rhel4-G-multiarch-dd.img 
> file onto a floppy.

Was this a driver that came with the server (aka Dell provided)?

> 3.  Floppy drive, hmmm... I have located a specimen of this 20th century hardware 
> device in my boneyard, hung it on the SC440 and gotten it to (possibly) work.
> 
> 4.  I install the driver from the diskette by booting the Centos 4.0 CD with "linux 
> dd" and then following the prompts to install the driver.
> 
> I boot into Setup, change the default diskette device from USB to Internal, then 
> proceed as above.  Sure enough, the install detects the fd0 device and offers to read 
>   driver files from it.  The diskette drive then kicks briefly, and errors out.  The 
> portion of the message not obscured by the following dialog box reads:
> 
>       or -2147483630 reading header: cpio: read failed - No such file or directory
> 
> Well, the floppy is not a cpio archive, it's a mountable filesys:
> 
> total 105
> -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           23 Jun 14  2005 disk-info
> -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           59 Jun 14  2005 modinfo
> -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root       102128 Jun 14  2005 modules.cgz
> -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           26 Jun 14  2005 modules.dep
> -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          588 Jun 14  2005 modules.pcimap
> -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          698 Jun 14  2005 pci.ids
> -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          370 Jun 14  2005 pcitable
> -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           27 Jun 14  2005 rhdd
> 
> I would begin by verifying the diskette drive I'm using actually works (a step I've 
> skipped thus far), but I suspect I'm going a lot wronger than that.  Any guidance is 
> much appreciated.

Well, the modules.cgz file is the CPIO archive (gzip'd).  You could perhaps
extract the contents of the modules.cgz file and see if maybe there's a kernel
version mismatch, although I would imagine the error mesasge you are receiving
would reflect this.

Are you able to download RHEL4 Update 5 Beta CD #1?  Perhaps you'd have some
luck getting it to detect your hardware and hopefully CentOS will have it's
own v4.5 out shortly.  I was able to use the kernel with RHEL4 U5 to install
on my Dimension 9200's.

That is another question -- what version of CentOS are you trying to install?
CentOS 4.0 or CentOS 4.4 which would have a newer kernel and perhaps built-in
driver support for your SATA chipset.

Ray