OpenSolaris install issues on ICH9M southbridge

[taintsauce]

Out of curiosity, I downloaded the latest OpenSolaris disc and went to install on a spare partition on my laptop (I have a triple-boot with XP/Ubuntu filling the main parts and 7RC on the spare, so no stranger to odd OS installs).

GRUB came up and when I hit the entry for the installer, it hangs, giving some error about bad or corrupt data. I rebooted and loaded the disc (physical media in the dvd-rom drie) from VirtualBox in linux. It booted with no issues, brought up the live environment and all that. This leads me to believe that there is an issue with ICH9M SATA support of some sort in the kernel.

Anyone have any experience with this/know of any hax to get it up and running? Googling for the issue yielded a whopping four hits, one of which was a kernel patch dated a couple months ago that had one line about ICH9 fixes, but I'm not going to **** around with patching the kernel and spinning my own ISO.

-the taintsauce

 

[Ijack]

I have successfully loaded OpenSolaris on a computer with a MSI Neo P35 m/b. This uses the ICH9 Southbridge. However, my DVD-drive is IDE, not SATA.

 

[taintsauce]

I have successfully loaded OpenSolaris on a computer with a MSI Neo P35 m/b. This uses the ICH9 Southbridge. However, my DVD-drive is IDE, not SATA.

This makes sense. A) There are some differences between the ICH9M and desktop ICH9 chipsets and B) Your IDE drive isn't handled by the ICH anyway (no IDE in ICH9...handled by a 3rd party chip).

I guess if I got desperate I could load it onto a USB drive and see what happens.

 

[Ijack]

On the other hand, my hard drives are handled by the ICH9 - so OpenSolaris must support the chipset when driving a hard disk. As you say, the IDE is handled by another chip (Marvell 88SE6111 in my case).

It may be, as you say, that there is a problem with the mobile chipset.