seagate sata Hard drive struggles with Linux
 

seagate sata Hard drive struggles with Linux

In my case it's Linux Mandrake 9.2. I'm not going to repeate my exact problems lest the moderators put me in a gullotine for duplicate postings, but anyone concerned can read about the gist of this situation here:


http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=135933

and a search of users: studpenguin


If someone would care to share what it is that must be done. Hey spare other fellow owners of Seagate Sata harddrives the struggle.

The make and model of the drive itself is not as important as the make and model of the controller. The Sil3112 SATA controller, as used on several motherboards, is supported in kernel versions 2.4.22 and onwards. Support is still pretty poor for SATA in Linux but it's getting better. There is a *long* thread on SATA and Linux here. You might want to read all of it.


Håkan

It takes a while for linux to support new hardware easily. this is generally
true whenever a new type of hardware comes out. you'll find some hacked
kernel patches that barely work after a few months. then it will slowly
get better and better over the months, depending on how common the
hardware is, and if the specifications are open from the manufacturer.
so, figuring out how to do it now, will have little to do with the procedure
6 months from now. then after it's working ok, the drivers will get faster
as features in the drivers are supported. then when new versions of
the hardware come out, only a few changes to the driver are necessary,
and support will be quick.

Well by the looks of the options that the Mandrake 9.2 install prompts me by asking to add

DISK/SCSI intefaces



it appears Mandrake 9.2 supports a number of SATA RAID formalities,

though the SEAGATE option doesn't do much of anything.

I'll logoff and make sure to write down "Sil3112 SATA controller"

and see if I can make that selection

No such luck.

In that DrakX program,

There isn't a "Sil3112 SATA" controller option,

there is, in addition to:

"SEAGATE"

"Silraid" & "ATA raid" --- both of these prompted me for more 0x 's numbers base_address etc. . . . I'm at a total loss about what to type in and where to find those spec's




"SEAGATE"

"

Studpenguin...
I may be no authority on the matter, as I am having trouble getting my SiI 3122A to work as hw-tph may well know, but i do not see where you mentioned what SATA controller you had plugged your disks into. I know that I have a Gigabyte GA-8I875 Ultra with 4 SATA Ports, two are Labelled SATA0_SB and SATA1_SB and these are controlled by my Southbridge Controller Intel ICH5-R (My motherboard is a P4 Titan based on 875P Chipset) and then there are two connectors right next to SATA0/1_SB that look Identical except for the Label written in tiny white writing that says SATA0_SII and SATA1_SII which are controlled by the SiI 3122A so depending on which tiny connectors you have plugged your drives into (presuming that your motherboard has more than 2 SATA ports) you may indeed have a totally different chip controlling them, so if the SiI doesn't work it may mean that you have got your drives plugged into a different chip than what you had previously thought. Also, Mandrake *may* not have compiled SATA support into your Installer's Kernel, which is a similar problem to what I am having, except with debian... as you may observe here http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=136234 I hope that you find a resolution to your problem so we can all enjoy Linux in a perfect OSS world...

My two favourite things to asy about windows are...

• In a world without windows, who needs gates?
• Microsoft Works (A Real Oxymoron)

Problems with seagate SATA TOO!
 

i can't install ANY LINUX DISTROS ON MY SEAGATE120 SATA. Linux will not find my hdd in the install, anyone have an idea for me? I went to seagates page, but that only has drivers for windows... Someone else told me to set my sata to support SATA and PATA in bios and change IDE to legadcy mode... i think, or something like that, but my bios does not have those options, can u plz help?
thanks,
Dimitri

SATA and linux
 

I got my Seagate 120 GB SATA drive to install linux as follows:
1) Need correct driver: ata_piix
This is included with Fedora or can be gotten off the web at linuxhq.com and put on a driver disk.
2) For my PC (from dell) I had to switch IDE Drive UDMA in the BIOS from on to off for the duration of the install.
That's it.

Re: SATA and linux
 

Switching the socket for the SATA cord didn't do anything


rkrupp,

linuxhq.com seems like an excellent source of information, but

http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/file/d...csi/ata_piix.c

is showing a lot of different choices. How do I decide which one is best for my 80 Gig SATA Seagate Hard drive?

Pardon my sarcasm --- nothing against anyone, but I'm really glad I didn't pay money for a Linux package.

Who needs an operating system that doesn't know its ass from a modern hard drive anyways?

So you're telling me Windows picks up all SATA controllers right out of the box with no driver installation? And, ahem, pardon my sarcasm.

Håkan

Windows doesn't have it so that the entire Kernel has to be altered from a a download list in some obscure site that involves countless other esoteric scavenging hunts and inquiry along with some other esoteric patch with a little bit of a crapshoot of finding just the right esoteric person online who is more apt to blame the hardware producer in the end or sell me their "expertise" for a small fee.

Sure all the real users who know something about Linux swear to it's security and stability, but hey . . . there's some other reason why Windows is still slaughtering it in terms of revenue received.

I love this quote from a site about Linux patches, which I'd give you the link, but it doesn't seem to work today:

http://12.24.47.40/al/12/106/10485.htm


"For those who are not experienced Linux users, please be aware that you do not patch drivers into Linux the same way you patch drivers into Windows. You do not download a new driver patch and click install. When there is a new driver, you must recompile a new version of the kernel. This is just how Linux operates and is why you see a long list of all the kernel versions on http://kernel.org/. If you are not experienced with installing a new Linux kernel, we recommend that you consult with the appropriate documentation or have an experienced Linux user perform this update for you."

SATA RAID +Linux Sucks!
 

I thought "hey, I will improve my business server by installing two Maxtor 120GB Sata in a Raid1 system, with the STLab PCI SATA Raid (Sil3112 chip) controller card.

I have now spent two days trying all the latest Linux distributions I found (Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 1, Mandrake 9.2, Xandros 2.0 and Suse 8.2 - no, I haven't bought the version 9 of Suse yet). Red hat and Fedora just don't pass the first installation screen (the screen goes on and off so fast I can hardly read the page I am at. Mandrake, well, same as the first post, no driver available and no option to load one from floppy. Xandros just didn't boot the install process and Suse did try, but always hang in the formating of the sda drive process.

So, I will have to go back to Windows 2000 professional, which has no problem and I will run Apache2 web server, which allows me to get as many virtual domains as I wish. All that, with desknow for the email section, norton antivirus to work with it and I am all set. But what a waste of my time.

Linux is far from being THE solutions to IT problems.

If anyone can find a solution to this, I will be more than happy to revert my server. I cannot afford to purchase 2 ATA drives and the ATA Raid controller to install in linux. I guess I should have checked first how linux behave with SATA systems.

I was unable to install Redhat 9 on a SATA drive - it does not pick it up in the installer - until l had set the drive to 'Legacy mode' in the bios. Nothing else worked. Once this was set though it worked sweet as.