FC3 on Tyan Thunder Opteron S2882

[hayward-redhat at loup.net]

First of all, thanks to the folks with Tyan Opteron motherboards for
inspiring me.  Knowing that FC3 x86_64 will install on someone else's
S2882 convinced me there must be something funky with either my media
and/or cdrom drive.

I know my motherboards, CPU's and RAM are definitely ok.  I have three
of them and they've all been running SuSE 9.0 (which I installed over
the network after booting via the Samsung cdrw/dvd SN-324 I got with
one of the systems) just fine for a year and I've never had a problem
with lock ups, memory corruptions, etc.  I don't have any USB devices
or hardware plugged in aside from a monitor, keyboard and mouse.

I can boot FC1 for i386 just fine on the opteron system and use it to
mediacheck the FC3 x86_64 Disk #1 successfully.  I can also mount the
media and browse it on two other drives on another machine so there is
no reason to believe the media is bad or even incompatible with the
drive.

When booting any FC install it is interesting to note that I always
get the following types of kernel messages but with FC i386 it doesn't
seem to stop it.  In fact these error messages are probably media
related since I get them when booting x86 boxes as well.

<4>usb_control/bulk_msg: timeout
<4>usb_control/bulk_msg: timeout
<6>cdrom: open failed.
<7>ISO 9660 Extensions: Microsoft Joliet Level 3
<7>ISO 9660 Extensions: RRIP_1991A
<4>Unable to identify CD-ROM format.
<4>VFS: Can't find ext2 filesystem on dev loop(7,0).

When booting FC3 Disk #1 after the /sbin/loader prompt I also get
kernel messages indicating errors trying to read from the cdrw/dvd
drive.  There must be an atapi driver difference between FC1 x86 and
FC3 x86_64 and somehow my dvd/cd-rw drive exposes the problem:

<4>hdb: status timeout: status=0xf0 { Busy }
<4>hdb: status timeout: error=0xf9IllegalLengthIndication MediaChangeRequested LastFailedSense 0x0f
<6>hdb: DMA disabled
<3>hdb: drive not ready for command
<4>hdb: ATAPI reset timed-out, status-0xf9
<3>Buffer I/O error on device hdb, logical block ????
<4>end_request: I/O error, dev hdb, secor ?????

I switched to an old HP cdrw from another machine I used to burn the
media and I no longer get these errors.  I notice it runs in PIO3
instead of PIO4 mode since it's an older slower drive.  FC3 x86_64 now
installs just fine... this is the first time I've gotten FC x86_64
working since I always figured it was a kernel / motherboard
incompatiblity.

Perhaps my Samsung cdrw/dvd is defective, but is strange to me that it
works works fine from other distros and with FC1 i386... maybe they
are running it slower and it is speed related.  I find myself
wondering if it would help to have Samsung replace the cdrw/dvd drive
since the errors only occur when installing FC x86_64.

- Mike