Yesterday I decided to reformat my Alienware m7700 Area-51 machine. It's supposedly a laptop, but it's actually a beast and it has a power supply that emits as much power as a small nuclear plant. Anyway, I put in a 500Gb and a 120Gb drive, with the 120Gb as a slave. The machine comes with a RAID controller (Promise SATA 378 TX2), but I have it turned off and in ATA mode. Win7 installed fine; the only problem I have is with the sound. My front speakers in my quadraphonic setup refuse to work. It's strange. I even have the latest drivers from Creative for my Audigy2 ZS Notebook. It used to work fine before.
I figured I'd solve that problem later and decided to install Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) on the 500Gb drive. The LiveCD boots up fine, but when I try to actually try out the LiveCD or even try to install Ubuntu, it fails. Everything hangs after this message:
ata3: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)
After searching on the internets, it seems to be a RAID controller issue and a fix exists in the kernel. So I don't know why I still have the problem. If anyone knows of a solution, please let me know! I'm going to keep working on the problem and see if I can solve it.
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