ubuntu 6.10 and ICH6M-sata don’t mix
I give up after spending a whole day on trying to get Ubuntu 6.10 installed on a Sony Vaio VGN-S580BH laptop (kindly donated by intel thanks to the efforts of Keith Packard and Eric Anholt).
While the system runs nicely off the live-CD, it (rather gparted) hangs during the partitioning/formatting procedure of the installation.
I filed the bug 72631 on launchpad regarding this issue since I could not find anything about this issue there beforehand.
If someone has an idea on how to “persuade” the ahci to work with that ICH6M-hardware, I’ll gladly welcome any input on this.
November 21st, 2006 at 3:15 am
I had a similar problem with my vaio, that’s what I did:
I used an VMware virtual machine with my phisical disk. I started the virtual machine with a live cd. I mounted the target partition and made a debootstrap. Then, I installed and compiled my own kernel (2.6.18 from kernel.org standard series), and then I installed grub.
BTW, I’m not sure if it was that chipset (my laptop is not here to check), but I had problems with sata on my vaio too and this is what I did.
November 21st, 2006 at 3:30 am
Maybe you could boot off the live cd, do the partitioning with fdisk or cfdisk and then start the installer and tell it that your drive is already partitioned?
November 21st, 2006 at 3:31 am
Have you tried the alternate cd installer? It doesn\’t use gparted, so you may have more luck.
November 21st, 2006 at 4:10 am
I had the same issue (Not the same laptop though). I tried the alternative installation CD in text mode and everything went fine.
November 21st, 2006 at 4:44 am
Could it possibly be what we (Mandriva) have filed here?
http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/MandrivaLinux2007Errata#Jmicron_JMB363_IDE_controller_no
and
http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=27068
if so, if the BIOS has an option to set the controller to AHCI mode, that may help…
November 21st, 2006 at 6:45 am
There may be an option in the bios to turn off AHCI mode, which you can then turn on again once you’ve upgraded your kernel. The linux-ide list might be able to help, however their answer is probably going to involve using a newer kernel which isn’t very feasible for you.
November 21st, 2006 at 8:01 am
Did you try the alternate CD as well. I heard it works better in many cases…
November 21st, 2006 at 8:34 am
Try to disable power management at system startup (kernel parameters "acpi=off noapic"). Sometimes it solve strange problems.
November 21st, 2006 at 2:15 pm
I’ve had suspend/resume problems on my Thinkpad T60. Those went away when switching from AHCI to legacy mode in the BIOS. That might also help here.
November 21st, 2006 at 3:04 pm
The bios of this sony vaio laptop unfortunately does not offer me any option to change anything like "AHCI-modes". Another odd fact I came across is that FC5 installs just fine on the sata-disk (using some 2.6.15 kernel… probably pretty patched), Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (also using some 2.6.15 kernel-version) does not install either and FC6 also refuses to install on this machine. All other tips suggested here in the comments sofar did not help. My oh my *sigh*
I will go with FC5 install it, update it, upgrade that to FC6 (hoping with the available updates for FC6 it can deal with the sata-disk-controller) and wait for feisty to become stable enough to install it (also hoping it will work with the sata-disk-controller). I would have no issues with using FC if only yum wasn’t so slow compared apt (I don’t trust apt on FC… in case you wonder why I’m not planning to go that route). This is one of the days I wonder if folks on the XP/Vista side have an easier life
November 22nd, 2006 at 12:57 am
since noacpi and acpi=off have been suggested already then I’ll add "irpoll"
"Modern PCs are horrible. ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we’re kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce."
-linus torvalds
November 22nd, 2006 at 12:35 pm
You’ll be pleased to know that yum in FC6 is *MUCH* faster - unsure how it compares to apt, but there’s just no contest between FC6 and FC5 yum.
November 23rd, 2006 at 11:03 am
I have faced exactly the same problem with the live CD installer on my computer at home. The Live CD ran fine but install just hung mid-way. My PC was not a VAIO, but I think the problem is with the amount of RAM you have. What I found was that since I had 256 MB of RAM, I was better off using the ‘alternate’ install CD. That worked just fine! Although the official page seems to recommend using the alternate install route only if you have 192 MB or less of RAM, I found my regular CD install experience very frustrating on the computer with 256 MB RAM.
There was a page on the net which recommended creating a swap partition to allow Ubuntu to write to swap and somehow let gparted crawl ahead. But even that did not work for me. I was able to progress just a bit further before it hung again. If you want you can give that method a shot too. Have lost the link to the page which had the instructions, but this page (http://cutecomputer.wordpress.com/2006/07/18/ubuntu-606-installation-on-legacy-pc-low-ram/) is close to what you need to do.
HTH.
November 23rd, 2006 at 2:52 pm
@ Siddharth: The amount of RAM installed in the vaio is not the issue (with 2 GBytes there is plenty). It’s really a ahci/libata issue related to the used chipset in the laptop.
November 23rd, 2006 at 10:53 pm
Hi, i had problem like you, but it had been solved by adding "noapic nolapic" to boot options.
But main reason why I’m replying is that i have problem with ICH6M chipset (Its SATA Controller) and my SATA II 5400rpm disk with NCQ (official configuration).
"hdparm -T /dev/sda" will tell buffered disk speed maximally 34.0 MB/sec, and If there is request on disk, iowait time of CPU gets to 100% and whole system gets totally unresponsible. For example apt upgrade (of average 10 packages totaling 30MB in .debs) gets 30 minutes of CPU’s 100% time (generally iowait time).
sata controller/sata disk uses ata_piix driver.
linuxquestions thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=503699
January 1st, 2007 at 7:48 pm
The solution is to boot a working kernel, add this line in the
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file: "blacklist ahci"
You must regenerate your initramfs after doing that:
update-initramfs -u -k 2.6.17-10-386 (or whatever ubuntu kernel you intend to use)
then reboot.
More info here: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.17/+bug/45636/comments/10
August 27th, 2007 at 11:31 am
Closing according to reporter\\\’s last comment: it works fine in Feisty.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:07 am
The linux-ide list might be able to help, however their answer is probably going to involve using a newer kernel which isn’t very feasible. Well good luck and thank for the infos.