CentOS - Jan 2006 - sata_nv, CentOS 4 update 2 and hang during post-install

Good day.  Thanks in advance for any help.

I have a Tyan S2895 (Thunder K8WE) with 2 275 Opterons and the latest
(1.02) bios.  It appears to have an nVidia nForce SATA chipset which
connects to a 250gb WD Caviar SATA drive.

Using the CentOS 4 update 2 x86_64 DVD, the install is peachy until
half-way through the "performing post install configuration" bit.
Then it hangs forever.  

I have tried:

disabling RAID in the bios
mem=256M on the command line
a text install -- the hang was at the 50% marker
a memory check -- all clean according to memtest86+ 1.65
CentOS 4 update 1 on cd
smaller root partition

without any change in behavior.

I then installed an old Adaptec 29160N and an old SCSI disk and turned off
the SATA bits in the BIOS.  CentOS installs just fine. 

Has anyone else seen this issue?  If it's a problem only with the nVidia 
SATA drivers, anyone have a recommendation for a SATA card that could be used
instead of the onboard stuff?  RAID is not necessary.

Thanks again.

Cheers,
Zube

On Mon Jan 16 04:33:11 PM, Zube wrote:
> I have a Tyan S2895 (Thunder K8WE) with 2 275 Opterons and the latest
> (1.02) bios.  It appears to have an nVidia nForce SATA chipset which
> connects to a 250gb WD Caviar SATA drive.
> 
> Using the CentOS 4 update 2 x86_64 DVD, the install is peachy until
> half-way through the "performing post install configuration" bit.
> Then it hangs forever.  
> 
> I have tried:
> 
> disabling RAID in the bios
> mem=256M on the command line
> a text install -- the hang was at the 50% marker
> a memory check -- all clean according to memtest86+ 1.65
> CentOS 4 update 1 on cd
> smaller root partition
> 
> without any change in behavior.
> 
> I then installed an old Adaptec 29160N and an old SCSI disk and turned off
> the SATA bits in the BIOS.  CentOS installs just fine. 
Following up to my own post, the symptom was not SATA as I suspected but
the USB mouse, specifically a Logitech MX Laser 1000.  It isn't clear if
the real problem was the USB port itself or this mouse, but moving to
a normal, wired PS/2 mouse cured all of this machine's current hardware 
ills.  It's odd that the mouse seemed to work fine during the initial
bits of the install but caused havoc later on.

The success with SCSI may have been a quirk;  I would very occasionally 
get the install to finish on the SATA drive, but on reboot or on first login, 
the machine would freeze hard.

No one replied to my query, so this is for the archives.

Cheers,
Zube