I have a Gigabyte GA-K8U-939 motherboard with a ULi M1689 chipset, and am trying to install knoppmyth onto a 400 gig sata drive. The bios recognizes the hard drive correctly, and pata compatability is not a given option. From googling around, it appears that the linux kernel has supported this chipset for some time now, however I am having problems getting the machine to reboot after the initial install. When rebooting, I get the following:



From searching on this forum, I'm assuming that I'm having some kind of difficulty with sata support. I located the following post:

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=9743

which seems to come up with a solution for this issue. I've booted using the LiveCD, extracted the kernel source, and ran make menuconfig. When looking through the options though ULi sata support already appears to have been selected as a module. Does this mean I need to recompile my kernel? If so, could someone point me in a direction that might shed some light on this process? I took a look at the wiki, and I'm afraid to say that it left me quite confused.

If recompiling the kernel is too big of a chore, what's the deal with grub? I stumbled across this post, but it left me with some questions as well.

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=9595

Can someone point me to a user friendly version of installing grub? Unfortunately I don't do too well with man pages.

Or would I be better of abandoning trying to get the on board sata to work, and get a pci card? Or scrap this motherboard and get a different one?

TIA for any help in this matter.

I'd say use a different mobo (my intel chipset mobo works fine with KM & SATA) or use a PATA HDD.

Maybe you can use a small PATA HDD to boot and for the root partition. Then use your SATA drive for /myth (where all the recordings are stored).

Thanks for the reply. Dumb question, has anyone tried this before, using a small pata drive, and a large sata drive? I'm willing to give this a try, I've got a couple 40 gig drives laying around here. I suppose my question is if the system can't read my sata drive when it boots, how will the system see it after it boots from a pata drive?

The same way it sees a SCSI drive, or a USB drive, or an NFS volume after it boots. At some point during or after the boot process the correct kernel modules get loaded (e.g. sata_nv), the drive gets mounted, and there it is in your file system just like anything else.

It's working now. I've got it loaded, and I'm running some updates through synaptic. I bought this motherboard because I was having issues with an asus mobo that would freeze up when running mythfilldatabase that I couldn't resolve. It was the only mobo this dealer had that still used a agp slot instead of pci-e. I didn't want to have to buy another video card if I didn't have to. Glad the solution was this easy. Many thanks.