amd64/108172: Installation fails on new Intel 965 motherboards.

[Achilles Speliotopoulos]

>Number:         108172
>Category:       amd64
>Synopsis:       Installation fails on new Intel 965 motherboards.
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       critical
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    freebsd-amd64
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          update
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Sun Jan 21 03:50:17 GMT 2007
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Achilles Speliotopoulos
>Release:        FreeBSD 6.2
>Organization:
>Environment:
Could not install on Intel 965-series motherboard, and a Core 2 Duo E6400 processor.
>Description:
I recently installed FreeBSD 6.2on my new machine.  Details of the
machine are as follows:

Machine: Velocity Micro Student Edition.  It has Intel DG965RY
motherboard/chip set.

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6400

Memory: 1GB

Partitions: Contained one WD SATA 320GB HD with Win XP Pro, and one
Seagate SATA 400GB HD partition into three partitions.  Install was on a
300GB partition on the Seagate drive.

DVD Drives:  One Lite-on DVD-RW and one DVDROM drive.

I downloaded the FreeBSD 6.2 ISO's for amd64, and burned them on a CDs.  I then
tried to install from the DVD drive.  The install did not find the CDROM
drives.  This is most likely because of the new Intel 965 motherboards has
drivers that are not compatible with FreeBSD.  (They are not compatible with most Linux distributions. Take a look at http://www.intel.com/cd/channel/reseller/asmo-na/eng/products/linux/tech/319373.htm.
In fact, I tried to install Fedora Core 6 and Debian (both 3.01r4 and 4.0 test versions), and the exact same problem happens; they were not able to detect the CDROMS as well. I was finally able to install Fedora Core 6 by first installing WinXP on a 16GB FAT16 partition, and then did a hard drive install.  It worked (although Fedora cannot use the audio), although Fedora cannot see my two DVD drives. I tried to do a hard drive install with FreeBSD using a similar trick, but could not get the installer to find the installation files on the dos partition.

>From the newsgroups and forums, this problem seems to be coming more and
more prevalent as Core 2 Duo processors are become more popular.  A "fix" for LINUX that I found on comp.os.linux.setup was to use "all-generic-ide"
or "linux acpi=off all-generic-ide".  It seemed to work for other
people, but it did not work for my machine.  The installer was able to
detect the DVD drives, but when it started anaconda, the machine hanged.
I suspect that it is because my hard drives are SATA drives.  I do not know if such a fix will work for FreeBSD.

Best reagrds,

Achilles Speliotopoulos 

>How-To-Repeat:
Just ry installing again.  I also tried installing with acpi off.
>Fix:
Try instaliing without using CDROMs.
>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: