Q I tried installing Fedora on my Athlon 64 box last night. The problem is this: I have two PATA drives and four SATA drives, and if I try to use both types I get a lot of garbage during boot and a lock up. The info is excessive and contains a lot of 'fffffffffffff' and'CPU locked' messages. When I disconnect the PATA drives all is fine, or if I disconnect all the SATA drives and leave only the PATA drives, things are again fine -but I want to use both types. It is not a fault of the motherboard, because Windows can handle the six drives at once, not to mention two DVD drives.
A There are some known conflict issues with controllers used for both PATA and SATA devices (ie the same controller handling both types of drive). You haven't told us exactly which controller you are using, so we can't be certain, but that seems to be the most likely cause for this behaviour. Some devices do have boot-time workarounds though. Log in as root and use dmesg to check for the hardware found at boot. The lsmod command will tell you which modules are running on your system (check the entry for libata, which is often used to load the SATA drivers). A Google search for 'Fedora' or 'Linux + the device name,/driver/etc' may yield some results, or tell us specifically what hardware you have and we can investigate further.