Hello,

I installed RedHat9 on a Dell PE700 with two SATA Maxtor Disks.
The installation went throuhg fine, RH9 just recognized the drives
as regular IDE drives. Performance is extremley bad: 3MB / sec

After browsing Google-Results, I decided to upgrade the kernel,
from 2.4.20-6smp to 2.4.27. As usual, it takes a day, but finally,
it is running.

The problem: the harddisks are still at /dev/hdc and /dev/hdd.
Question: How do I get the harddisks to work with the new SATA driver?

Please let me know what additional information you need...

As far as i know, the Linux kernel 2.6 series supports SATA disks. I have installed SuSe today, it uses Linux kernel 2.6 series and it did detect the SATA drive.

Nobody can tell me how to switch to a different driver in Linux?

i am no expert but have read you may need to reformat your drives to make them appear as scsi to the kernel so sata modules will load or kerenl inbuilt sata will work.

instead of fdisk /dev/hda or cfdisk /dev/hda you may try
fdisk /dev/sda or cfdisk etc then same command but sdb

if nothing works for you at the moment you may have nothing to lose to try it?
be aware if I am wrong its a clean install to recover to ide.

2) if you have a knoppix 3.6 apparently that has a option to use a kernel 2.6 at boot so you may want to see what it makes of your satas b4 trying the above suggestion?

Well, I tried a couple of things, all without any success...
I finally got Fedora Core 2 (Thanks to http://www.lsl.com.au, came over night ,
oh, and you guys at http://www.ht.com.au, I am still waiting on the Suse distro... )
and now, everything works fine now. The system recognized the drives as
scsi drives, and the through put went up from 3MBytes/sec to 55MBytes/sec !

I have changed my signature for a link for FC2 errors.

If you use FC2 be aware its partition tool seems to bodgie up the geometry.

or read in the FC section if you wish