Before I go to far into this, I am new to SATA hard drives so please be patient. I never had one before. I picked this one up by accident, I was half asleep and looked at one box and grabbed the other So I will just keep it and get it to work.

Anyways. I want to start very simple and work my way up to getting it to work.

The SATA is a Western Digital Caviar SE. It came with a WD SATA cable that plugs into the SATA device plug interface connector. I am hooking it up to a Compaq Presario S6000SL that has an ASUS motherboard with two SATA slots, SATA 1 and SATA 2.

My first question has to do with powering the drive. It has the normal power connector on the back but it also has a SATA device plug power connector. Do I need both or one or the other. Even though my motherboard has two SATA slots the power supply has no SATA power receptacle connector.

This link has excellent info on my computer as well as a diagram and picture of my motherboard.

Compaq Presario S6000CL

You can power the drive with either the IDE power OR the SATA power, not both. Plug it into SATA 1 and away you go.

One issue you might find is that your bios may reorder your drives or even rename them. I found on my Abit IL8 board that if I have 1 SATA, 1 IDE HD, and 1 IDE DVD drive, it sees all the drives as SATA and names them /dev/sda (SATA), /dev/sdb (IDE HD) and /dev/scd0 (DVD).

If I then plug in a 2nd SATA, I have /dev/sda (SATA 1), /dev/sdb (SATA 2), /dev/hda (IDE HD), and /dev/cdrom0 (DVD).

Thanks. It seemed logical to use one or the other, but since it is not working now I wanted to start with the most obvious and basic questions, lol.

I am using Ubuntu 7.04 and it is not registering it. I will check the bios and see if it is doing what you said above.

Now with SATA drives, will Ubuntu automatically pick them up like it does with a usb device or an IDE HD or is there more that needs to be done to set it up?

(((The WD Caviar SE came with a Microsoft only compatible disk with drives on it, as well as Google software and diagnostic tools.)))

I just went into the BIOS, Award Bios Core 6 version 3.10. All it has there are the IDE 1 0, IDE 1 1, (for the hard drives,) IDE 2 0, IDE 2 1, (for the cdrom and dvd,) IDE 3 0 , IDE 4 0 (empty with only IDE options available,) and the floppy. There is noting there for a SATA drive, even though the mother board supports SATA.

I tried mounting the SATA a few different ways with the terminal and I looked at gparted, nothing. It is only registering HDA1, HDB1 and HDB3 (my two hard drives with three partitions.)

So now the question is, what should I try next?

Edit: I am use to the IDE jumpers, CS, slave, main..... Do I need to do anything with the SATA ones, which are,

Default - No jumper added (what it is set at right now.)
SSC Enabled - Jumper on pins 1-2
PM2 Enabled - Jumper on pins 3-4
OPT1 Enabled - Jumper on pins 6-7

You shouldn't need to mess with the jumpers at all. You might need to look around in the bios and see if you need to enable the ide 3 channel. Or see if there's anything listed about enabling SATA (or SATA controller) or converting IDE to SATA. Sorry, I'm not much help without being in front of your machine. But it sounds like a BIOS setting is off somewhere.

Edit: You shouldn't be able to mount the drive because there's no filesystem. But you should be able to see it in GParted.

Back to basics. What is the output of "lspci"?

pljvaldez, thanks. I will check out the bios, I may just have missed something.


Quakeboy02, here is lspci,


00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8378 [KM400/A] Chipset Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI Bridge
00:0a.0 Communication controller: Agere Systems 56k WinModem (rev 01)
00:0b.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. IEEE 1394 Host Controller (rev 80)
00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VIA VT6420 SATA RAID Controller (rev 80)
00:0f.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge [KT600/K8T800/K8T890 South]
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 60)
00:11.6 Communication controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 80)
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 78)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV44A [GeForce 6200] (rev a1)

I have searched through the internet, checked rechecked and re-rechecked the bios, Looked all over the motherboard for a possible jumper to enable the sata drive (didn't see any unless I missed it.) Then I ran across something on the internet. This person said he had a hard time getting a SATA drive to work so he set the opt1 enabled jumper, which changed it from 300 MB/s to 150 MB/s I figured what the hell. If I break it I will just take it back and say it was defective LOL and then get an IDE one. But it worked. Gparted picked it up as SDA. I would like to set it back to 300 MB/s but I am guessing I won't be able to with my motherboard. It appears not to support that at all. If I am wrong and it does and I can change it back, someone please let me know. Even if it is months from now and you just happen to run across this post

Thanks everyone for helping my trouble shoot this and figure out what to do.


Edit: After I set up the SATA drive with gparted (ext3) I added this line in fstab to auto mount it,

/dev/sda1 /media/sda1 ext3 rw 0 0