SATA CD/DVD is the answer to Intel 965 chipset problems

[cl at isbd.net]

Just to report success in my issues with an Abit AB9 Pro motherboard.

This motherboard uses a JMicron SATA/PATA interface to provide a
'legacy' IDE interface but Ubuntu (and other) Linux distros don't yet
have support for the JMicron SATA/PATA in the kernel.  It's supposed
to be in kernel 2.6.18 but my experimentation tends to suggest it may
not be 100% yet.

So I bought a SATA CD/DVD drive (a Samsung one in my case but I don't
think it matters) and now my system not only boots from the CD but the
whole installation proceeds as normal.

You have to turn on AHCI in the BIOS and then select the right CD
device to boot from (it's *not* the SATA CD!) but that's all, plain
sailing from that point onwards.

There's still the issue of drivers for the GigaBit LAN interface but
that's much easier when installing the OS can be done smoothly.

-- 
Chris Green (chris at halon.org.uk)