Gutsy Gibbon installation fails for seemingly no reason

[Beacon11]

Hello all. I am a first-time poster, but not really new at Kubuntu. However, I have honestly never had an installation problem before- albeit I'll admit, and some of you will agree, that this time I'm using new / not really documented hardware. Before I start in on my problems, let me give you a brief overview of the hardware I am using, and how it is set up.

Motherboard: Via EPIA PX (Pico-itx)
Processor: C7 1.0 GHz (specific for motherboard, small form-factor)
HD: Seagate Momentus 5400RPM 160GB 2.5-inch 44-pin IDE
CDROM: Pioneer DVR-K05 slimline optical DVD-RW
(At this time I am using only an Apple Extended USB keyboard, no mouse)

Now... this motherboard is about 7 x 10 cm. It's tiny. Because of this, it only has 1 44-pin IDE connection, and 1 7-pin SATA connection. So, since my hard drive is IDE, I hooked it up via the 44-pin connection. Because I used that connection up, and so as to avoid any potential speed loss from having two devices on one IDE cable, I got a 50-pin slimline optical to SATA adapter, and hooked the CDROM up via the SATA connection. However, when I booted and looked at my bios, this is what I saw:

> IDE Channel 0 Master [PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-]
> IDE Channel 0 Slave [ None]
> IDE Channel 1 Master [ST9160821A]
> IDE Channel 1 Slave [ None]

Notice it puts my CDROM as primary master, and HD as secondary master. Also notice that the CDROM, which is hooked up via SATA, is listed as IDE. What in the world? Okay... so you know that much. This might be my problem, I don't know. How to solve it, I haven't figured out yet.
Now on to installation:

I am attempting to install Gutsy Gibbon. At the installation screen, I pressed F6 and deleted the silent install option, so I could see everything as it was happening. It was quick, but from what I saw, there were no errors, and suddenly, after it said the following:

...
...
[ 53.361307] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid
[ 53.361365] /build/buildd/linux-source-2.6.22-2.6.22/drivers/hid/usbhid/hid-core.c: v2.6:USB HID core driver

It said:

BusyBox v1.1.3 (Debian 1:1.1.3-5ubuntu7) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs)_

I honestly have no idea what initramfs is. After I let it sit for a while, at that prompt, it says:

(initramfs) [ 112.109884] hda: lost interrupt
_

and it won't let me type anymore. I guess hda is my CDROM drive, and hdc is my HD. I've tried earlier versions of Kubuntu, and I've tried Gentoo, which gives a different error, being unable to partition the hard drive (although it does know it's hdc). I can be more specific if you like, but Kubuntu gave me better error messages. What do you think? Do you have any suggestions? Any advice you give would be greatly appreciated... I'm just lost here. Thank you so much!

[dibl]

Re: Gutsy Gibbon installation fails for seemingly no reason

Probably your state-of-the-art motherboard is ahead-of-the-Linux-kernel-art.

Your CD ROM drive must be an IDE/PATA drive, and adapting it to the SATA connector doesn't change that characteristic, apparently. Perhaps a better strategy would be to get an IDE cable that has a second connector on it, and hang both the hard drive and the CD ROM drive on that cable (guess you'll need a 50-pin to 44-pin adapter). The hard drive should be master (in BIOS) -- both devices can have the jumper on the CS pins.

That might work -- sounds like a grand experiment, anyway.

[Beacon11]

Re: Gutsy Gibbon installation fails for seemingly no reason

Thank you dibl, if all else fails, that is what I'll try . What's funny is that openSUSE installs flawlessly... makes me mad, because Kubuntu is far superior.

[dibl]

Re: Gutsy Gibbon installation fails for seemingly no reason

You also might want to experiment with some of the kernel boot options -- acpi=off, etc. -- there are bunch of them, and I don't happen to need them so I don't know what all things they do, but I recall seeing that if you're lucky the right boot option will overcome that initramfs error that you got.