Debian Sarge on nForce2 with SATA and ATI Radeon X850XT

Hello,

I just recently switched from SuSE 10.0 to Debian Sarge and had quit a hard time getting it installed. However, I finally managed. Basically I had two problems to solve:

"How to get Debian installed on a SATA drive"

and:

"How to install ATI's official linux driver"

What was necessary for me to solve the first problem:

- Unplug the power from any other harddisk in the system.
If grub finds any other disk, i.e. an IDE/PATA disk, it might try to install the bootloader on that other disk and your kernel will fail to boot.

- Boot with "expert26".
This will enable options you need to get the SATA module working.

- Set your keyboard and language settings.
Using "expert26" will need you to work through the installation steps more or less manually but it is rather straight forward. Continue until you have to detect the CDROM drive.

- Unselect "sata_nv" from the list of modules when probing for the CDROM drive.
You should not have your CDROM drive connected to SATA ... If the nForce2 SATA driver gets loaded during this process it will quite likely fail to detect any disks. I do not know why this is but perhaps it is passed some options at this stage, which it does not like. Continue with the installation steps until you get to the network detection.

- Unselect "sata_nv" from the list of modules when probing for the network.
The same problem occurs here. It is also not possible to unload the module once it is loaded and all you can do is to reboot. Continue until you get to the detection of other hardware.

- Select "sata_nv" from the list of modules when probing for other hardware.
When the module gets loaded at this point it sometimes still cannot find its disk (like 1 out of 3 times it fails). However for me it found the disk and I could start partitioning it.

- Continue with the installtion.
From here it should work all normal. Do not try to install "testing" or "unstable" with an ISO image for a "stable" distribution. It will fail.

It is possible that your kernel fails to boot properly due to the problems with the "sata_nv" module. Try to boot again if that happens. This occured to me once.

Atfirst I thought my hardware is broken. But since Windows XP with all nVidia drivers works just as fine as my SuSE 10.0 with a 2.6.13 kernel does I believe it is the rather ancient 'stable' Debian kernel (2.6.8) that is causing this problem.

To get an "ATI Radeon X850XT" graphics card working I had to do:

- Setup a system which uses the VESA Xserver.
Do not select the ATI Xserver. That one is outdated and will only work up to a 9800XT. None of the newer X-class Radeons will work.

- Download the ATI installer package from ATI's website: "ati-driver-installer-8.33.6-x86.x86_64.run"
There are also two smaller files available for download but I went for the larger, more universal one.

- Install the debian packages for kernel headers and kernel source tree:
"kernel-headers-2.6.8-3"
"kernel-kbuild-2.6-3"
"kernel-patch-debian-2.6.8"
"kernel-source-2.6.8"
"kernel-tree-2.6.8"
"linux-kernel-headers"
If you first select the header and tree package it will install the other stuff through their dependencies. The packages are needed for the ATI installer to build a new loadable module. If you are having problems then make sure you have things like "make" and "gcc" installed as well.

- Run the "ati-driver-installer-8.33.6-x86.x86_64.run".
This will create the loadable module and add alot of other things to your system. What it does not do is:

- Edit your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file and replace "vesa" with "fglrx" in the driver section.
That will tell the X server to use ATI's driver called "fglrx".

- Logout from KDE/GNOME and press CTRL-ALT-Backspace to kill and restart the X server.
The X server will restart with the new driver. If you have a decent monitor you should now be able to run modes like 1280x1024 with 85HZ. The modes that are being used are exactly the same as under Windows. So if you have setup your monitor to best fit Windows' video signals you can now share it with Debian and there is no need for tweaking with xvidtune.

Hope this helps,
Sven