Hello,

I am trying to do an update to my workstation. Slackware 9.1 with kernel 2.4.24. The BIOS is configured for "Enhanced" IDE mode. The kernel will detect all of the IDE controllers as ICH5, PATA and SATA as desired. It will detect all of the equipment on the PATA and SATA controllers and report the them correctly. It will read the geometry of the first hard disk and scan for a partition. But on the SATA controller it chokes on the fetching the drive geometry and is just hung there. The drive is a 36 GByte Seagate 10K rpm drive. The drive will work if the BIOS IDE mode is set to "legacy", however on the Intel D865PERL motherboard, it will disable one of the PATA controllers. My requirements are for both of them to be active with at least one of the SATA. For the moment the only way I can use the machine is to remove the power from the SATA drive to allow the machine to boot up.

Does anybody know if a kernel parameter or something else is needed for the kernel to communicate properly with the drive?

Thank you.

Follow-up information: I have found that passing the kernel parameter "hde=noprobe" would at least allow the kernel to boot properly. Of course the drive was not operational, but all the other drives operated just fine. I also stumbled across the kernel patch called "libata" and applied it to the kernel and the drive is now operational as a scsi type of device (/dev/sda).

Cheers.