After downloading Fedora Core 8 x86-64 the other day, I burned it to a DVD last night and put it into my home desktop's DVD drive for some Linux installing goodness..Which completely failed.
Some Google searches turned up tons of issues with Intel ICH6/7 south bridges in conjunction with PATA ATAPI drives. In other words: the new Intel ICH use a SATA to PATA bridge to support PATA (old-style Parallel IDE). Since both my hard drive and optical drive are PATA, they go through this bridge.
Linux supports this using the ata_piix driver. This driver has a bug: it doesn't support PATA ATAPI drives, such as CD-ROM or DVD drives. So, the Fedora installer starts up, but when the ata_piix driver initializes, it can no longer see the DVD-ROM. So no Fedora 8 goodness for me at all.
Admittedly, if I were using all manner of SATA disks, this problem wouldn't come up at all. It's the combination of ancient (PATA) and modern (Intel ICH7) hardware which causes my problem. Still, overall, quite a disappointing performance.
No comments:
Post a Comment