Asus P5B Install - a preliminary solution

hflacke · n00b Joined: 27 Jul 2006 Posts: 7

I read about the problems with the new P5B Asus getting the CDROM running.

Here is my way:

- The 2006.0 Live CD does not recognize the CDROM after booting from it.
- You have to use an alternative CDROM to install from - i.e. a USB CDOM

To get the system running after installation:

echo "= sys-kernel/mm-sources-2.6.18_rc4-r1">> /etc/portage/package.keywords
emerge =sys-kernel/mm-sources-2.6.18_rc4-r1
cd /usr/src/linux
make menuconfig: <M> JMicron non-AHCI support (Experimental)
genkernel --no-clean all

boot the Kernel with den parameter "all-generic-ide". i.e.:

title Kernel 2.6.18-rc4-mm1
kernel /boot/kernel-genkernel-x86-2.6.18-rc4-mm1 \
all-generic-ide root=/dev/ram0
init=/linuxrc ramdisk=8192 real_root=/dev/sda1
initrd /boot/initramfs-genkernel-x86-2.6.18-rc4-mm1

After booting you will find the CDROM at" /dev/hda"

zuluxxx · n00b Joined: 21 Apr 2006 Posts: 40 Location: Paris, France

Hi I've had the same problem with Gigabyte GA 965P DS3, no CDROM
install from net,

could you tell what would the grub look like for non genkernel users ?
(no initram neither)

Noss · Guru Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 420

I have the some problem. I have an asus p5b, with ICH8 for sata and JMicron for IDE drives.... The kernel 2.6.18-rc have a module for the ICH8 but no for the JMicron. Other kernels have a driver for the JMicron but no for the ICH8 chipset.
When will be released a kernel with the two options?

Also you talk about solution for the problem, but I don't see that module in that kernel... I only saw other JMicron module but no ICH......

Another thing... When I compille the kernel 2.6.18-rc4 I dont have a problems, but then when I want make emerge nvidia-kernel I recived errors!!!. If I compiled with gentoo kernels (2.6.16-rc4) I dont recived errors. Why ?

Thx bay! and good look!

hflacke · n00b Joined: 27 Jul 2006 Posts: 7

hflacke · n00b Joined: 27 Jul 2006 Posts: 7

Noss · Guru Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 420

zuluxxx · n00b Joined: 21 Apr 2006 Posts: 40 Location: Paris, France

it s straight in device drivers

agent_jdh · Veteran Joined: 08 Aug 2002 Posts: 1783 Location: Scotland

IIRC the JMicron driver is in the libata section. Remember, you'll need to have scsi support (scsi basic support, scsi hard disk, and scsi cd rom) enabled if you use the libata driver - even for IDE optical drive.
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FantomKnight · Posted: Fri Aug 25, 2006 7:45 pm Post subject:

Hey guys, look in the BIOS on the P5B. Does the SATA controller have a "Compatability Mode" option? If so, choose that and it should solve the problems. I had to do this on a Dell PowerEdge server a while back to get Gentoo to install.
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agent_jdh · Veteran Joined: 08 Aug 2002 Posts: 1783 Location: Scotland

What driver supports the gigabit ethernet on the P5B btw? The normal realtek 8169 driver? It's one of the boards I'm considering for a switch to Conroe.
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Noss · Guru Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 420

agent_jdh · Veteran Joined: 08 Aug 2002 Posts: 1783 Location: Scotland

Noss · Guru Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 420

Hi!

You must chaing this lines in your src/r1000_n.c

vladoportos · n00b Joined: 02 May 2006 Posts: 22

Hi,

I bought this ASUS P5B Delux and as i read here that was a terrible mistake

gentoo wount boot, ( no setting the SATA controller to "Compatability Mode" doesnt help at all)

I dont have ani USB CDrom to boot from... what can i do ? i realy need to install that gentoo ... also i read that there is problem with NIC ...

They should put sticker on box "NOT FOR LINUX" or somethink.

Im getting despred, i realy thinking to go and buy windows... cause this sux terrible... i do not need cd rom on it cause is for "server" there is just 6 SATA HDD and 1xIDE... i need that to work fine also NIC...

Fuller_ · Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 1:43 pm Post subject:

vladoportos · n00b Joined: 02 May 2006 Posts: 22

Actualy win works without problems... i change motherboard with my work pc so i have now that Pentium D and on server is LanParty DFI which works fine... som im installing gentto now

Tom17 · n00b Joined: 13 Mar 2006 Posts: 22

So, I got an Asus P5B just under a week ago and have been struggling with it since. This was meant to be a simple "swap the drives to the new mobo and get going". I dont think I need to start a new thread on this as there seem to be loads already. Also dont want to pollute the threads for the new livecds that "kernelOfTruth" has been making. So i'll bung it here. Sorry if this is the wrong thread...

On my first attempt, I simply put my old PATA boot drive onto the JMicron PATA port. This drive had an old standard x86 Gentoo install on it. So I set the BIOS to boot from this drive, which was no problem, but then GRUB would not even get to the Stage1.5/2, it would just give an error (I forget the error number right now - but it basically meant disk not found) before the GRUB menu. This was where my frustration started. I figured that the grub code in the MBR was looking specifically for (hd0,0), but now I could not tell which drive it would be recognised as by GRUB. I also did not wish to risk changing the MBR just yet as I wanted the option of putting the drive back into the original PC as I need to use some of the services configured on it.

OK, so at this point I realised I would have to do a fresh install, however as this was to be a server machine, I did not want to put a CD-ROM drive into the it so I was trying to do this from a USB stick. After hours spent trying to make a working bootable USB distro, I got my new machine up and running. Very cool, except the distro that I managed to get booting from USB (DSL)would not see either the ICH8-SATA drives or the JMicron PATA drives. I then spent the rest of the day trying to get DSL-N working, which is a 2.6 kernel (after I discovered that DSL was 2.4 which does not suport SATA natively) but could not get this to boot from USB. *sigh*

Finally I ripped out a CD-ROM from another PC and booted an FC5 install disk as I heard that I could use the "all-generic-ide" option. So I went ahead with this. With the all-generic-ide option set, it seems that the kernel recognises SATA1 as hda, SATA2 as hdc, SATA3 as hde, SATA4 as hdg and the 2 channels on the JMicron as hdk & hdl. After the initial install, I forgot to add the boot param "add all-generic-ide" again so the installation completed itself on sda rather than hda. I noticed this when there was no CD-ROM detected. So I rebooted, put the "all-generic-ide" back in but it was no good. Something was now expecting / to be on /dev/sda* but it was on /dev/hda* instead so it would not boot.

Re-installed FC5, this time remembering to add "all-generic-ide" after the post-install reboot. All was ok. The SATA drives were detected as hd* (not my preferred solution, but it works for now) and the JMicron-connected drives were visible. No networking though. I downloaded the network drivers from Realtek, compiled them (after copying across an FC5 kernel-sources rpm on a USB stick), installed them (they loaded fine) but I could not get any life out of the network card by following their instructions. So I bunged in a cheapie realtek 100MBps card for now. All is ok.

Now I started getting to know FedoraCore5. its ok, but not quite Gentoo that I was used to. It installed by default using LVM which was new to me. After not being able to shrink the LogicalVolume mounted on / (I do not need a 300GB root partition!) and not being able to retrieve some data from another LVM'd drive, I decided I won't use LVM for now. Re-installed FC5 again, using normal partitions instead of LVM and I cannot get it to boot. It hangs before the GRUB menu can appear with a blank screen!!!

So now, I am back at the starting block, trying to decide what to do so I thought I would post my experience so far in here.

And now for a question...

Will it be possible for GRUB to boot from a drive on the JMicron IDE controller? I dont think GRUB knows how to identify that disk. Maybe its another problem. What woudl I have to do to make grub see the disk?

This is the final set up I would *like* (as I will not need to reconfigure everything on a new server)
My old PATA system drive on the JMicron controller as my boot drive. It would be nice if I could leave my x86 Gentoo system intact.
My old PATA data drives on a PATA card I will plug in (Haven't even gotten there yet)
2 * SATA drives plugged into the onboard SATA ports - I will configure these as software RAID1 in Linux.
Onboard GB NIC to work.

I guess I will have to settle for a SATA boot drive on the SATA1 port. (will need to buy ANOTHER SATA for my RAID if I do this *sigh*). I see myself trying one of these 2.6.18-rc5 AMD64 Gentoo live cd's and doing a fresh install that way. At least I get to keep Gentoo.

I am used to building pc's that "just work" (Yeah, Windoze). This is the first one that has really kicked me in the nuts like this, cheers for any help.

</stress>
Thanks for listening

odegard · Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2006 3:27 am Post subject:

I just ordered the ASUS P5B, knowing there would be problems initially. Things will work out eventually though.

I plan to try this: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/liveusb.xml

From what I've understood, the SATA drives will work provided you connect them to the ICH8 and not the JMicro controller. So, I'll use my current gentoo system to make a bootable liveusb stick and install from there. Pft, who needs cd-roms!

Tom17 · n00b Joined: 13 Mar 2006 Posts: 22

Yep, the SATA drives connected on ICH( work just fine. The only thing I know in that regard is that if you use a normal kernel, they are sda sdb sdc sdd but if you use the all-generic-ide boot option then they become hda hdc hde and hdg (I assume that the generic ide option assumes that each controller has 2 drives as a normal pata controller would, but each controller only has one drive as its SATA)

Thanks for that link, I think I will try to get that liveUSB working, it could be my ticket to a working PC!

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2006 8:59 am Post subject:

If windows boots off the JMicron, it should be no problem to load grub at all (I could be wrong)

but the next problem is to get SATA / native mode on that controller running "properly"

I haven't :roll:

it either works & takes pretty long to detect my IDE-drives
or
it just hangs there (& doesn't reach init / the root partition)

I haven't tried SATA on that controller since I only got 2 SATA-drives & don't want to switch the controller (at the moment connected to the Silicon Image Hardware Raid), otherwise I would lose all my data of the raid0

sorry, that I can't give you any input on that point (SATA)
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odegard · Posted: Sat Sep 09, 2006 9:51 am Post subject:

Tom17 · n00b Joined: 13 Mar 2006 Posts: 22

No luck yet... There are some big differences in how liveCDs work and liveUSB and I have not worked out the subtleties yet. I need to sit down and fiddle with the init scripts I think.

Funny cos last week when I was making my first ever liveUSB's it was a simple matter of copying the iso conents to your USB stick and configuring syslinux.cfg. I will sit down and work out the subtleties this weekend I hope. Will post my results here

Tom...

odegard · Posted: Sat Sep 09, 2006 11:37 am Post subject:

Hm, I just finished making the live USB...

I haven't assembled the new system yet, since I have to use some of the older parts. Meaning, when I put the new system together, the old one will be gone. So, I'd like it to work.

What problems did you encounter?

odegard · Posted: Sat Sep 09, 2006 4:39 pm Post subject:

Alright. Assembled the new system. POST is fine, BIOS is fine. BIOS even recognizes the removable media, the live USB stick I made, but it won't boot from it.

Dangit.

My old system is laying on the floor and I won't reassemble it.

Bah, guess I have to install windows and wait for kernel 2.6.18

odegard · Posted: Sat Sep 09, 2006 4:47 pm Post subject:

Ok, tried to boot my laptop from the USB stick (a D410 Latitude) and it worked. So, the problem must be with the ASUS P5B board.