JMicron PATA problems

[Encryptor]

OK, so I bought a new computer yesterday.
A Core 2 Duo E6600 on an ASUS P5B Wi-Fi motherboard with 2 GB or RAM. RAID(0)-ed 3 Seagate SATA drives and left one SATA WD Raptor to be the boot drive. Also, there is 1 PATA connector which has 2 DVD drives connected into it: 1 Asus DVD-ROM and 1 LG DVD-Writer. As far as I understood, the ICH8R (with the Intel Storage Matrix for RAID) is responsible for the SATA hard-drives, and the JMicron JMB363 controller is responsible for the 1 external SATA port or the 1 internal PATA. ICH8R can be set into AHCI/RAID/IDE mode and JMicron into RAID/AHCI/IDE mode. So, I set the ICH8R into RAID mode (for the 3 Seagates) and JMicron in IDE mode (for the DVD-ROMs which are connected to the PATA port). Looking at the boot screen, I can see that everything was detected correctly. I get a notification (that everything is fine) about the RAID that I created and,afterwards, I see that my 2 DVD-drives have been detected. Cool! So then I put the Ubuntu 6.06 (Kubuntu) DVD in the DVD drive and booted the system. I thought it would be nice to check the memory, so thats what I tried to do. I got a blank screen. The system was not responding even after I waited for 5 minutes. I restarted. Booted from the DVDrom again, and chose: Install Kubuntu. It loaded the kernel, I see the blue Kubuntu icon, and then the process stopped at : Mounting root filesystem. "Great" I said, when the system went back into the terminal and left me with a blinking cursor.
"Ok.. lets try a text installation". The text-based installation seemed to start well.. I chose the language, I chose the keyboard layout.. but then I see "it" : Failed to detect the CD-ROM. "So where exactly did you boot from?" I asked the computer (boy am I glad I was alone in the office when talking to a computer). Afterwards, Ubuntu asked me whether I have a floppy with a driver, and I said No (where the hell should I go to find a driver for my dvdrom anyways?). And then I tried using the "cdrom" module along with /dev/cdrom. I didnt expect it to work - and it didnt, so that was pretty useless, but worth trying. And now, I press Alt+F2, go into the shell, and run: "ls -al /dev | more" . The output was beautiful: amongst other devices, I found these devices: sda, sda1, sdb, sdc, sdd. No hd*. (Now that I think about it, sda is probably the WDC Raptor, and sda1 is the windows partition on it [forgot to tell you that I created a partition on the WDC prior to booting the Ubuntu CD] ). Then I tried to mount /dev/sda1 to /mnt/sda1. "mkdir /mnt/sda1; mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1" -> the error (it would be too easy if it worked) was "mount: Mounting /dev/sda1 to /mnt/sda1 failed: Illegal argument". Same thing happened when I tried variations of the command (I thought maybe this version of "mount" has a different way of taking parameters, but I couldnt get it to work anyways),I tried variations of the devices hoping that I will be able to find the device for the dvdrom (like sdb, sdc).. In the end I gave up on mount. The next thing I did was: read the system messages, or whatever they are called. so I run: "dmesg | more" and I start reading in hope that I will find something related to my DVD-drives. I remember seeing some lines about "sd module needs an update", some SATA drives being linked to "sdd", so I figured sdd must be my RAID0. Some warnings/messages (perhaps errors, don't remember) about sdb and sdc (and the message that the "sd" module should be updated). Logically, sdb and sdc should be the DVD Roms connected to the JMicron controller (which is in IDE mode). Now I am confused. PATA shouldn't be detected as SATA or SCSI. So I start searching the Ubuntu forums. It appears others have the same problem. One user happened to have the same chipset (P965) and the same LG DVD writer as I do. No solution in his thread except "load the ide-generic" module and some speculations about the SATA module (dont know which one) interfering with the detection of PATA drives if ata_piix is loaded after the sata module. And then somebody said something about booting in "expert" mode and choosing first the ide-generic module, and the load all the other ones. I tried: didnt work. So then I searched the internet. I found some hope here: http://pcburn.com/article.php?sid=1590 .
I see that there are some patches to the kernel being applied to a release candidate of 2.6.18 (rc1). After checking kernel.org, I noticed there is a rc4 already, so the jmicron support should already be included in this release candidate.
Great, now what? Is there a way to patch the driver on the DVD (assuming that I can edit the ISO with UltraISO on a Windows machine)? should I wait till they release 2.6.18? If so, when will the Ubuntu installation CD/DVD will actually include a kernel version with support for JMicron?
I am pretty stuck right now, I hope somebody can advise me on how to get Ubuntu to work on my new machine.
Thanks in advance! and sorry for the long post, I had no time to make it shorter

[Encryptor]

I accidentally replied to my own post

[mtang]

Hey, just wanted to pop in and say that I've been having exactly the same problem too with an Asus P5B Deluxe. Any solutions would be great.

[Encryptor]

Is there another way of installing ubuntu?
I really liked the network installation of FreeBSD.. Load from a floppy, select a mirror and leave it over night.. anyways, if I could get ubuntu on the drive, then I could probably boot without the DVDroms and patch the kernel myself (assuming that the patch will solve my problem). what do you guys think?

[mtang]

I tried using instlux, which runs in Windows and puts a small Ubuntu installer on your boot partition. You'd want the network version, not the CD-ROM one. I tried the network, but couldn't get it to connect to the repository. Maybe you'll have better luck?

[kzt]

I also have a P5B motherboard, and I am experiencing the same issues (Kubuntu 6.06 Desktop). I don't understand why there is an issue with linux and the JMicron controller, since other OS' can use it without additional drivers. As for the instlux net install, this fails because it doesn't support the Realtek ethernet controller.

[mtang]

I salvaged an old Ethernet NIC from an unused machine, and ran the net install of instlux using that, and I now have a happy Dapper install running . Still don't have access to the optical drives, but I'll live with that until I can figure it out.

[Encryptor]

For some reason, instlux refused to boot, so I downloaded a mini image from the main ubuntu server (i'll post the link later, its in the netboot folder). I managed to get it up and running with a bit of hassle. Indeed, there were problems with the Ethernet controller, but the funny thing is that 1 of the built-in LAN ports worked, when the other one didnt (it was detected, but no DHCP..)! I don't know why, but even in windows, 1 LAN port worked immediately, the other one needed a driver (i suspect they have 2 different controllers, one of them being unsupported). Anyways, Ubuntu is installing now,I am waiting for all the packages to be installed, and, hopefully, I'll have a running system in the next few hours. I plan to patch the kernel afterwards and I'll post the results. Pray for me, as this is the only hope left
In the worst case, even if the patch doesnt work, I wont be able to use the DVD-ROMs until this gets fixed by the gods above . Meanwhile, I'll try to understand why the RAID wasn't detected properly, but thats another story and another post
Am I wrong, or all these problems are because JMicron entered the market recently and nobody cared enough to support their products? And now that ASUS is using their controller(s), developers found out about them and are/will be working on supporting it?

[Encryptor]

I installed the 2.6.17.8 kernel. Didnt fix my problems.
Then I tried to install the 2.6.18-rc4-mm patch (which contains some fixes for JMicron), but it wouldnt patch: it complains about reverting some files and that it cant find several files. So I am stuck. Again. Any ideas on what to do further (except for waiting for Ubuntu 6.10), or any suggestions on how to get the 2.6.18-rc4-mm patch to work with the 2.6.17.8 kernel headers?

[ihcnet]

I have the exact same problem with the exact same motherboard. I found a forum post yesterday on some Fedora forum from Alan Cox, a kernel developer.
He said that he had actually caused the probelm, and that a fix should be included in the kernel by the final version of 2.6.18. Here's a link:

http://fcp.homelinux.org/modules/new...post_id=105517