SIIG SC-SAT212-S4 / Silicon Image / SATA problem

[peter]

I just had the strangest experience with Fedora Core 7. Fortunately it's fixed.

My main samba server died, so I decided to replace it with an upgraded clone Celeron I had stuck in a corner.

I added a SATA controller (SIIG SC-SAT212-S4) that uses a Silicon Image BIOS version 4.3.7.6.

The Celeron BIOS would detect the drives, but the FC7 installation CD would always immediately prompt "Press any key to reboot" before the grub screen would appear.

The problem would go away when I disconnected the Maxtor 7L250S0 Maxline III 250 GB drives from the controller.

I found many threads talking about using a soldering iron to ground a pin on the SATA disk's controller board. But I wasn't going to do that! Here's what I did:

1. I know that SATA drives are hot swappable, so I just unplugged the drives' SATA cables, while they were still powered up.
2. I then booted the FC7 install CD till the grub prompt appeared.
3. Then I hooked up the drives.
4. Installed Linux normally.

For some reason the Fedora boot CD doesn't detect this combination properly prior to the grub load.

[Schotty]

Interesting ....