Problem with SATA drive

SlackTRAXX · 04-20-2006, 12:28 AM

Hello! I'm new to Linux and I'm still trying to get everything in place after installing Slackware 10.2.

I was doing fine with all the support that is on the Internet, I could manage to make every single device to work, but this SATA disk

I'll tell you about my PC so that you can give me perhaps more answers than I could find until now:

I have Slackware 10.2 running a 2.6.15.6 kernel on an 80GB IDE disk. It has an ASUS P4P800 motherboard with Intel ICH5 controller. In the same PC, I have a Windows XP in a 160GB SATA Maxtor drive > the troublemaker! I can't get to see it in Linux.

What have I done so far?

I recompiled the kernel with SCSI support, and (under that option) SATA support ("libata"). From what I've read, it seems like libata makes the SATA drive to appear as a SCSI drive to the system, and so it loads it to sda (sdb, whatever).

I look at dmesg and see nothing related to my SATA disk... I just see that in sda it loads the USB Mass Storage device.

This is really frustrating, I've read several articles but none of them helped me out.

Now I'm beginning to have doubts about the BIOS setup... perhaps it has something wrong... something about 'Enhanced SATA'... but I couldn't get information about it.

Could you help me out with this issue?

This is what lspci shows:

Code:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82865G/PE/P DRAM Controller/Host-Hub Interface (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82865G/PE/P PCI to AGP Controller (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev c2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801EB (ICH5) SATA Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV28 [GeForce4 Ti 4200 AGP 8x] (rev a1)
02:05.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c940 10/100/1000Base-T [Marvell] (rev 12)
02:09.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Audigy (rev 04)
02:09.1 Input device controller: Creative Labs SB Audigy MIDI/Game port (rev 04)
02:09.2 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Creative Labs SB Audigy FireWire Port (rev 04)

Thanks in advance.

I will gladly answer any of your questions to help me with this.

Electro · 04-20-2006, 01:13 AM

Did you compile SATA Intel chipset in the low-level section of SCSI as a module? If you did, try loading up ata_piix (I think). To make Linux automount SATA drives on the Intel controller, include it in the initrd file. You could run mkinitrd to let it help you add it. You will need to include --with-module=ata_piix to tell mkinitrd to include it while it makes an initrd file.

SlackTRAXX · 04-20-2006, 10:02 PM

Many many many thanks Electro! With just a modprobe ata_piix my SATA drive was seen by Linux!