Installing on old systems with only PATA/IDE hard drives

[Adam Williamson]

On Sun, 2013-05-12 at 21:27 -0400, Basil Mohamed Gohar wrote:
> I thought that this might be an issue with incompatible hardware, as I
> was trying to install Fedora 18 on an old Dell (Celeron D processor) I'd
> bought for my mother that she was no longer using.  However, I got an
> error when attempting to install when the process was probing the drives.
> 
> I thought maybe it was something wonky with the Dell hardware, so I
> ignored it for the time being, as the only results when searching online
> were apparently older, seemingly unrelated bugs fixed in previous kernel
> commits.
> 
> However, I ran into the same problem when attempting to install to a
> more recent AMD 64-bit system that I'd put together (and which has had
> older versions of Fedora installed on, but I cannot remember which at
> this time), but which still stalled at the same point during the install.
> 
> In both cases, the install process dropped to the dracut emergency
> prompt, and in both cases, I was attempting to install from a USB stick.
>  The USB stick image was verified in both cases, as well.  The same
> issue happened with both DVD images as well as netinst images.  I tried
> with both F18 and F19 Alpha.
> 
> Both systems were installing to an 80GB EIDE/PATA hard drive.  I
> encountered the same problem attempting to install to a 20GB drive as well.
> 
> It's a little challenging because the disk is inaccessible, and I could
> not figure-out how to save the install log up to that point.  Any tips
> on what I can do to make a proper report out of this would be most
> appreciated, or just let me know if installs to PATA/EIDE systems are
> just no longer supported.  I could not find any language addressing this
> issue online, but that could be just insufficient Google-Fu.

We do have an install-to-IDE device test in the validation matrix:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_install_to_PATA_device

but for the last few releases it's mostly been marked as "pass" by me on
the basis of virtual machine testing, so it's just barely possible it's
somehow broken on real hardware. I'd be surprised, though. The way I
test this is just to remove the virtio 'disk' from my test VM and re-add
the same disk image as a PATA 'disk' instead.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net