Debian on a Gigabyte 945 series motherboard
The world is always full of challenges. Today I need to set up a Linux server for a customer. No problem normally but this is a new motherboard I haven’t seen before. The Gigabyte GA-8i945GMH-RH with the new fancypants VIIV technology. I usually install Debian 3.1 “Sarge” on all my boxes but it would not install onto this one.
Sarge had two issues with the board, The ICH7-DH SATA controller and the Vidalia 82573L Gigabit Ethernet controller. Without a hard disk controller, it cannot install onto the hard disk. Having no network was also an issue.
To make a long story short, I installed Debian “Etch” beta 3 and lo, it worked and detected all the devices perfectly. I’m much relieved. I was dreading having to compile a custom kernel with buggy beta drivers and all that other yuckky stuff you had to go through in the olden days of Linux.
I also want to set up RAID5 with this box (it has 4 x 400GB SATA drives). The ICH7 chipset has a hardware RAID controller but after beating my head against that for an hour or so, I figured it was not going to work with Etch so I disabled the hardware RAID in the BIOS and set up software RAID which works really well in Linux.
That was this morning and so far Etch seems stable. This box is going to be a server running Apache2 and PHP. It needs to be very reliable so all fingers are crossed and I hope Etch will deliver the goods for me.
heh! I made the leap to etch after similar sata issues with sarge.
4 servers later - no reliability issues. Although I did compile a new 2.6.17.11 kernel for the sake of it.
You’ll find the raid is “fake raid” - drivers under windows required. Ignore it as you have done and go the software raid.
how does one disable hardware RAID in BIOS? I am having a similar problem at work.
It’s been a while since I have used this board. From memory, this is how you disable RAID…
1. Boot it up and press the Delete key several times to enter the BIOS settings menu.
2. Find the RAID option which is probably under ‘Integrated Peripherals’ (I can’t quite remember, you might have to hunt around a bit for it) and set it to ‘Disabled’.
3. Press F10 to save your new setting, the board will reboot and you should be set to go.
BTW, since I had a good experience running Etch on this board, I have now installed Etch on every server I maintain. It has been excellent and very stable.
Well, that seams to be an interesting solution, to set a software-raid instead a hardware one.
My problem: I want dual boot: I have also a Motherboard with 945P-chipset, set up a Hardware-RAID 0 and a Windows is already installed and running. I saved 50 gigs for a little Linux-experimenting-partition, but when installing etch (stable meanwhile), it does recognize the RAID. It shows both SATA-Disks, but no RAID-Volume.
How to teach debian etch-setup to recognize my hardware-raid, created by the onBoard Intel 945P-chipset?
I couldn’t figure it out either, that’s why I went for the software RAID. Of course that won’t help if you want to dual-boot with Windows.
Sorry Kastna, I can’t help you with that one. The only suggestion I have is to install an additional hard drive and put Linux on that.
i want to gigabyte motherboard all drivers
i want to 945gigabyte motherboard all drivers for donload
Etch has all the drivers built-in. You don’t need to install any additional drivers.