Distro installation on Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V - SATA IDE mode problems

Distro Discussion & Help
1

Hello all,

I’m attempting to install the FreePBX distro on a brand new Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V board. The UEFI BIOS this board originally came with had many issues with booting anything other than Windows 8; however the “F2” BIOS update seems to have resolved these issues.

I am using the Syba CF to SATA adapter and have a Transcend TS32GCF400 CF card installed. I was able to successfully install FreePBX on this configuration but have found that the BIOS intermittently detects the CF adapter. Placing the SATA controller into IDE mode fixes the BIOS detection issue, but makes the adapter invisible to the Anaconda installer. When I launch the FreePBX installer in advanced mode and get to the partition portion of the wizard, the only installation target available is the installation media.

The “CSM” compatibility function in the BIOS is turned on and all devices are set to Legacy mode, but I’ve tried multiple combinations of UEFI and Legacy with no luck.

This seems to be a driver issue with CentOS to me. My uninformed assumption would be that switching the SATA controller to IDE would make it even easier to detect from a compatibility standpoint. I found a forum post elsewhere that mentioned starting the installer with a “all-generic-ide” option of some sort. Is there any merit to that?

Any thoughts on this? Any assistance is much appreciated. Thank you!

2

I forgot to add that this is FreePBX Stable-5.211.65-11. Asterisk version doesn’t matter as in this case the problem is basic installation.

3

It should be noted that I was just able to install Ubuntu 14.04 LTS without any hardware detection issues with the same BIOS settings (IDE mode, CSM enabled, Legacy modes for all hardware). Is Ubuntu packaging more drivers that the FreePBX distro?

4

Just installed the latest version of FreePBX Distro last week. I have noticed that with FreePBX Distro, the hardware support is not … ideal. I had to use the “no RAID” mode on a Dell Optiplex 780 that had Intel hardware RAID enabled, just to see the LUN. (yes, I am aware that FreePBX is referring to software RAID) I also have had an issue where it doesn’t want to partition a completely empty drive, and had to switch over to command-line to create a partition (and thus a partition table) so that the installer would continue.

Do either of these suggestions help? The CF to SATA adapter not showing up in the BIOS seems rather suspicious. I have heard that CF to IDE / SATA adapters can be pretty flaky, depending upon the chipset in the CF card. Specifically, I have a Transcend -> IDE setup that kept throwing errors.

I recommend you go with a mSATA -> SATA adapter and a mSATA card, if you’re looking for a really small solution.