Hello,
I've set out to build a couple a cheap whitebox machines, for the purpose of testing out new products like Lab Manager, Stage Manager, etc in a non production setting. Since cheap is the driving factor, I've used AMD X2 5000 cpu's, 4 GB RAM, and 80GB SATA drives.
My motherboard is a jetway M26GT3-SVP, which uses an nvidia MCP61 sata controller. The BIOS is the most recent, and RAID is turned off in the BIOS.
When I attempt to install ESX 3.5 Update 2, the installer simply will NOT see the local disk. I've been all over these forums, and I see that other people have successfully installed onto this chipset... in my case, I can't even install at all. I would be delighted if all I need to do is edit the sata_nv.xml file... but I've not got that far.
To validate the hardware itself, I was able to install Fedora 9 on one of the test machines; KVM/QEMU and AMD-V hardware virt works great! The system is quite snappy, especially considering the cheap price.
As an aside, I did also put in 2 Intel NIC's, since the onboard is not supported... so that is at least squared away.
And... as an fyi, this is how Fedora9 identifies the controller in lshw:
description: IDE interface
product: MCP61 SATA Controller
vendor: nVidia Corporation
physical id: 8
bus info: pci@0000:00:08.0
logical name: scsi0
version: a2
width: 32 bits
clock: 66MHz
capabilities: ide pm msi ht bus_master cap_list emulated
configuration: driver=sata_nv latency=0 maxlatency=1 mingnt=3 module=sata_nv
I would appreciate any and all suggestions!! Thanks!!
