This is my hardware:

Abit NF7-S v2 (BIOS-27)
sil3112 SATA controller
Hitachi PATA hard drive attached to SATA controller with Abit's serillel2 PATA to SATA converter.

Knoppix fails to boot with a (screaming?) interrupt probem message appears after "audit initialisation" message:

irq11 : noboby cared!
Disabling irq11..

The SATA controller is on irq 11.


I've tried using "noapic" on booting knoppix but this make no difference. And after installing Knoppix 3.8.1 as a Debian system on a hard drive attached to a standard IDE controller found that if would not boot as soon as a drive is connected to the SATA controller, the boot stops with the same interrupt error. With no drive connected to the SATA controller, the SATA controller is recognised and the system boots - but that's no use.

As I would think this is a common hardware combination, I wonder if anyone has go this to work. I've no idea if it's a kernel problem, a libata/sata_sil problem or some setting in the Abit NF7-S BIOS.