Hi Folks,

I wanted to install linux (any) on my Sony VAIO S580 laptop. I had Windoze already installed, so I repartitioned the drive using GParted from LiveCD. Everything went well so I decided to proceed with installation of my Slack as the first and obvious pick. I chose the provided sata.i precomplied kernel from the CD that I have been always using to start up the system with the SATA controller. The device was discovered correctly and fdisk -l showed properly set up partitions. Unfortunately when the installer got to formatting the drive it hanged the system. So I rebooted and tried to make the filesystem manually from the console. In spite of correctly discovered hardware making filesystem was hanging every time I tried it. I tried to make reiserfs, ext3 and even ext2 but none of them worked for me. They were failing while creating the journal (reiser) or during some other things. In the desperation I started experimenting with other distros as follows: Gentoo, Fedora, Ubuntu with the same result. I was counting on their precompiled kernels that are newer the Slackware's one. Same results. I tried repartitioning the drive many different ways it also didn't help. Surprisingly enough, when I wanted to scan the partition from the GParetd LiveCD that has all the tools necessary, I was always able to format the drive with whatever filesystem as well as scan it, mount it and use it! It seems to me that kernel included in GParted LiveCD distro is the only one that can support my controller correctly.
Any ideas will be appreciated.

Best,
Chris

I found, with Slackware 10.2 and a Dell Inspiron 6000 (it's a SATA drive and controller and, well, laptops are strange and wondrous beasts) that sata.i (in 10.2!) was extremely slow dealing with I/O -- and I do mean SLOW, kind of like an old i386 on floppies. The sata.i is a 2.4.x kernel.

So, I did a clean install using the test26.s kernel which requires a little fooling around after installation. What I did was, after installation finished and the system rebooted, I mounted disk 2, changed directory to /mnt/cdrom/linux-2.6.13, and did upgradepkg *.tgz. That works just fine; fast, efficient and the SATA drive I/O is as fast as I expect it to be. Rebooting after that loads all the modules and things should work.

The first thing I do after that reboot is

mkdir -p /usr/local/patches
cd /usr/local/patches
ftp -i ftp.osuosl.org
cd pub/slackware/slackware/patches/packages
mget *

Let that finish (it'll take a while) and

upgradepkg *.tgz

Works fine, as described, for me -- YMMV.

Best of luck.

Thanks for your response, I tried this one too but experienced the same strange behavior when attempted to make the filesystem... I whish I could have a look at the .config file for the GPareted LiveCD kernel... There must be a flag or something...

It seems to me that I had a similar problem with Partition Magic when I tried to do the partitions with it. If I remember correctly, I went back made one big partition past the end of XP then used fdisk to actually make the individual Linux partitions during installation of Slackware. Maybe give that a try -- GParted may be "helping" you in a way that you don't want it to?

Thanks Tronayne,

This is definitely a good point to leave a diskspace following the windoze blank and let the fdisk do the partitioning. I'll give it a try tonight. However, I'm a bit scared of allowing the possibly malfunctioning SATA driver to access the partition table that has to be rewritten by fdisk... If the write process fails I'll loose the whole partition table... I have to back it up first I guess.
Anyway, yesterday I created customized Slackware CD where I added the latest 2.6.18 kernel which I previously configured with make oldconfig based on .config from standard sata.i. This time libata failed while it was booting up. Everything went well but damn sata driver. It actually discovered the drive and showed the proper drive parameters but right after that it got in the loop and showed some error message regarding sata couple of times. Then it finished booting and finally took me to the shell with no other errors. Drive was not visible though. I checked my custom kernel on my desktop where I also have SATA and it worked perfectly.
If anybody is interested my SATA controller is Intel ICH6-M (AHCI).

Best,
Chris

And today (or last night or whenever) Slackware 11.0 is announced... looking through the announcement, SATA support in the 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels, sigh. Might want to wait for your subscription CD-ROM to arrive, eh?

I suspect that fdisk knows how to handle the partition table (at least I've never had it fail to do so properly with either IDE or SATA drives and controllers) and it might be worth a shot and see what happens. Who knows, you might be a happy camper after all!