A7N8X Delux (nforce2) + promise tx2 lost interrupt woes

[arcterex]

Hi everyone. I've just got a nice new board and chip, an a7n8x dx and xp2500+. My previous board, an a7v, had four IDE channels that I could use (it was a intermediate board I guess, between ata66 and ata100 so it had two extra channels).

Because I have 8 drives (2 for / on raid0, 3 for /home on raid5, 1 cdrw and one cd) I had to get a promise PCI IDE card for the two extra channels.

However, for the life of me I can't get my existing linux to boot properly.

It gets a bit in, about the point where it starts touching the hard drives, either through mounting devfs or with software raid reconstruction, and simply freezes up solid. This is with the gentoo-sources 2.4.20 kernel. I knew when installing that I'd have to change some things for the new mb, but I didn't expect not to be able to get into my system!

So I've been trying to get the 1.4 boot cd to work based on instructions here, but I get the following while booting with nonet:

ide0 at blah on irq 14
ide1 at blah on irq 15
ide2 at blah on irq 17
ide3 at blah on irq 17
hdb 40021632 sectors (20491 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS2591/255/63
blk: queue 803fab0c, I/O limit 3095MB (mask 0xffffffff)
hdf: lost interrupt
hdf: lost interrupt
... this goes on for a bit with variations on the theme (hdf, hdg, etc)...

I'm wondering if this is caused by the ide2 and 3 being on the same irq? If I unplug the drives off the promise controller I can boot up fine, but as all my data and kernel info is on hde-h, this does me no good. My next step is to take out my cdroms (hdb,c) and plug in the raid drives to there, but this isn't a long term solution.

Anyone have any idea or suggestions??

BTW, my windows xp install on the hdb simply reboots a few seconds in

*edit*
It does look like knoppix 3.2 will boot up fine, showing ide 2 and 3 on irq 11, but knoppix doesn't have the nvnet driver for the onboard NIC, and I get errors with the 3c59x driver, so I can't get on the net for anything, but I can boot up
*/edit*
*edit*
I can boot up but when I reconstruct the raid array that is on the secondary controller, it freezes up....
*/edit*

[azlan]

have you tried the experimental, or the america's army cd's?

I have four, desktops (all custom) and two laptops, and the experimental was the first live-cd that would boot net and all on all of them.
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there is no crazy, only violet and non violet..

[boltronics]

I tried Knoppix with this board and I know what you mean about the networking issue.

Whenever I booted, I had to extract and 'make' the nvidia nforce2 nvnet driver. 'make install' won't work because you don't have write permissions. Instead, insmod the nvnet.o driver from the current location, and re-run '/etc/init.d/net start' (or whatever the init networking script was).

As for not having enough spots for hard disks on the mobo, I also know what you mean having upgraded from an A7V133. I don't have any SATA (and have no more money left), so I had to give one of my disks to another PC.
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[camresu]