Trying to install Centos 7 onto an older computer currently running Mageia 4. It has an HDAMA Arima motherboard with two dual core Opteron 280s. The installation media is a USB key. It has a SIL 3114 SATA controller on the motherboard, which never worked with SATA2 disks, and a second SIL 3124 SATA controller in a PCI slot to which the system disk is attached. In MGA4 these controllers show up as:
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01:07.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3114 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02)
03:01.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3124 PCI-X Serial ATA Controller (rev 01)
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1. plug in the USB key
2. reboot
3. at the grub prompt from the hard drive enter:
root (hd1)
chainloader +1
boot
4. The text installer comes up after an error message about the graphic installer failing.
5. Set the time zone
6. Try to choose disk/set partitions to use
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No disks connected, please shutdown the computer, connect at least one disk and restart to complete the installation
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mkdir /tmp/foo
mount /dev/sdb1 /tmp/foo
ls /tmp/foo
#shows top level of existing / (root) partition
Also after it goes wrong there is no way out. It puts up a Quit, Continue, Refresh menu, but the latter two just put the menu back up and Quit shuts down.
Is there maybe a command line way to tell the installer to do a minimal install into /dev/sdb1, without touching the partition table or the other partitions?
Suggestions? (Other than "get a newer computer", for reasons I won't go into, not an option.)
Thanks.