Installation problems on Intel DP35DP mobo with Q6600

jamestastic · Post by **jamestastic** » 2008/05/21 18:33:14

I have tried installing Centos 5.1 x64 on my lovely new quad core. The install starts from the SATA CD-ROM, but then pauses for maybe 10 minutes at "running /sbin/loader". Eventually it puts up a blue screen, and then later still it displays the menu on the screen. After tabbing to the OK, it then waits another ten minutes... You get the picture.

I have tried disabling USB on the mobo, even though it does not have PS2 ports, so doing so nukes the keyboard. I have unplugged all the drives. I have tried every kernel option I can find: noacpi, noapm, ide=nodma, pci=nommconfig, nousb, nofb, nobananas, every one I could find on every forum, and every combination thereof.

My hardware:

Intel DP35DP mobo.
8Gb mushkin DDR2 800
LG SATA DVD-ROM
WD 74Gb Raptor 10k SATA
MSI nvidia 8400 graphics card.

Systems happily runs the operating system of the beast 2008 and Xen Standard.

I do not currently have a CentOs box that I could do any compiles on or what-have-you, but I can install one in vmware. I have limited linux experience, though I have in the past built gcc cross-compilers on SGIs and windows, and downloaded the kernel and compiled/installed it, but this was 5 years ago now. I have dabbled in the past, however I'm committed to freeing myself of a certain operating system, so I'd like to not only get this installed but understand why it did not too. I'll be making a second post about installing it on my second machine.

Your help greatly appreciated.

Jamie

Post by **NedSlider** » 2008/05/22 18:00:02

Can you provide some more detailed information on your board (I have no idea what an Intel DP35DP looks like as I don't happen to own one)

What mode do you have the disk controller chip set to in the BIOS (does it have the option for AHCI?)

I assume the board uses ICH9R? Does it have a secondary 3rd party chipset for IDE ports?

Can you boot from the LiveCD?

jamestastic · Post by **jamestastic** » 2008/05/22 19:27:15

Grrr. All I had to do was update the BIOS to release 413.

I believe it was due to 64bit issues with PCI IRQs which adding "irqpoll" did not fix. The hard drivers were firing IRQ 74 which weren't getting handled. Who knows? Anyway, after bios update, dont get slow install and dont get irq errors...

Jamie

Post by **NedSlider** » 2008/05/22 19:57:42

Great - glad you got it fixed. I'd not seen that one before so was really struggling to suggest anything helpful.

And [b]thank you[/b] for reporting back - I'm sure it will help someone else :-)

jamestastic · Post by **jamestastic** » 2008/05/27 22:40:31

I should also add that although the ICH9R supports RAID, I'm using the AHCI option for the SATA drives and then using software raid to get the set-up I want. I'm also using a SATA DVD drive, and this works out of the box.

letsbangout · Post by **letsbangout** » 2008/06/07 19:33:28

To the OP, the problem you might've been having could have been related to incorrect memory reporting from the BIOS. I have several systems built on the Intel DG965SSCK board. I had a strange issue whereby the installation of more than 3GB of RAM would make everything run slow. The exception was 64 bit operating systems. Through much googling, I found that the 1669 BIOS for that board made everything work right above 3GB in 32 bit apps (Linux/PAE, memtest86, etc). BIOSes newer than 1669 are broken; they exhibit the same problem. It's like Intel broke everything in the new BIOSes (for that board) and won't fix it. I subsequently found that in Linux, you can specify the correct amount of RAM by calculating it from /proc/mtrr and then feeding it to the kernel at boot time with mem=1234MB etc. This method works fine in lieu of a BIOS fix, but isn't very scalable, so in every case I've opted for a quick BIOS flash to 1669.

So that I can file this away for future reference, I'm immensely curious - which BIOS version are you running?

Post by **NedSlider** » 2008/06/07 19:42:29

[quote]
jamestastic wrote:
I should also add that although the ICH9R supports RAID, I'm using the AHCI option for the SATA drives and then using software raid to get the set-up I want. I'm also using a SATA DVD drive, and this works out of the box.[/quote]

Yes, always a [b]good idea[/b] to avoid the fake onboard raid controllers and go with software raid... and yes, AHCI mode is what you want for SATA hard drives as the kernel ahci driver works great :-)

jamestastic · Post by **jamestastic** » 2008/06/11 19:18:43

@letsbangout :

BIOS release 413. And I'm running 64bit.

Jamie (The OP)

CentOS