SATA support

[imehl]

i just bought a western digital 250GB SATA hard drive. when i try to boot the system hangs right after detecting hda and hdb. then hangs on hdg which is the SATA drive.

i am currently running RH9 kernel version 2.4.20-31.9. i have read several posts pertaining to this issue. the best resource i have seen is:
http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html
apparently i need to install Jeff Garzik's libata driver from:
http://gkernel.bkbits.net/

the directions look pretty straight forward but just wanted to check to see if anybody has done this and it works. also, if somebody doesn't mind explaining what it means to install drivers like this into the kernel. i.e. what are these files "like" where do they get installed, etc.

by the way, my mobo is asus p4p800 which has the ICH5R SATA controller.

[cybertron]

My recommendation would be to update to a newer kernel. My understanding is that anything >(=?) 2.4.21 has SATA support built-in.

[imehl]

i just tried to upgrade to kernel version 2.4.26. however upon boot i get the error:

VFS: Cannot open root device "LABAL=/" or 00:00
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 00:00

guess this isn't a hardware problem anymore.

[PNash]

i had the same issues with Redhat, Mandrake, and Slackware, but today I tried SUSE 9.1 and it recognized my sata drive with no problems. I tried SUSE on 2 machines today, my work machine which is running a 2.8 Pentium 4 on a Gigabyte GA-8KNXP with onboard Sata Raid and I tried it on my home PC which is running an AMD 3000+ with a gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2, both with no problems. SUSE is running the 2.6.x kernel and so far in my opinion it seems to recognize hardware better than most distro's and has alot more software that comes with it like DVD Burning software, MP3 players, etc.

If you stick with redhat try upgrading to a 2.6.x kernel and see if it clears up your issues.

[cybertron]

It can be a real pain to upgrade a distro like Red Hat from a 2.4.x to 2.6.x kernel. I tried it with Mandrake and mostly failed miserably. It looks like you might need to append a root=/dev/hda? to your lilo or grub configuration. In mine it's just a line in lilo.conf that looks like: "root=/dev/hda7".

Also, that word LABAL looks suspiciously like label, so maybe it's as simple as a typo.

[imehl]

sorry, the LABAL was a typo on my part. changed this to
"root=/dev/hda3" and everything worked. this was a little confusing because you should not put the hard drive slice where your boot partition is located. you want the directory where the build files are.

tried upgrading to kernel 2.4.26 and also failed miserably. the system goes all the way to login but then i have no mouse or keyboard support. must be some USB driver issue.

again, this is no longer a hardware problem so feel free to ignore this post. i will update again if i get the thing working.

[pilotgi]

Just thought I'd mention this article (http://www.mozillaquest.com/Linux04/Asus_Sucks_Story-01.html) from the front page since you said you had an Asus motherboard.

[imehl]

so what would you consider to be a linux friendly mobo?

i don't like asus especially since they are kinda expensive and all the special features are for windows anyways.

[cybertron]

Originally posted by imehl
so what would you consider to be a linux friendly mobo?

i don't like asus especially since they are kinda expensive and all the special features are for windows anyways.

I think you'll have the special features problem with most motherboards unfortunately. They just aren't generally designed with Linux in mind, which would be why all of the BIOS flash utilities are Windows based. I bought an ABit and so far I'm happy with it, but I've only had it for about 2 hours:)

[imehl]

sorry this post became slightly off topic. i have upgraded to FC2 and that has solved most of my problems. However i still can't get the SATA drive to work. it is definitely detected by the system, here is the relevant output from /etc/sysconfig/hwconfig:

class: HD
bus: SCSI
detached: 0
device: sda
driver: ignore
desc: "Ata WDC WD2500JD-00G"
host: 1
id: 0
channel: 0
lun: 0
generic: sg0

don't know why the driver is "ignore". this should be controlled by the ata_piix driver for the ICH5R chipset i think. how do i check if the right driver was built into the kernel??

[imehl]

anybody??
the driver i need is ata_piix right? how do i check for this in the kernel?

[cybertron]

Based on the fact that no one has replied to this yet, you might want to try posting a new topic about it. I don't know for sure what you need built in to the kernel, so I can't help you unfortunately. I'm sure someone here can give you at least some help on the topic, but they probably aren't checking this thread.

[imehl]

i decided to post this on linuxquestion.org. unfortunately no one could help me there either. ended up working it out though so hopefully this will help anyone with the same problem:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=211975

[cybertron]

Yikes, it doesn't seem like it should be that hard. Glad you got it working though:)