[RH AS 4.0] Sata & Ich7
 

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to have a working RH AS 4.0 installation on a Lenovo 8212-1QG and I’m having trouble with the SATA ICH7 controller.

I first did a good working install on the Lenovo after what i realized with hdparm that DMA couldn't be enabled on it, and data transfers were very slow.

A good clue for me to find would have been to realize during the installation process that the sata drive was handle as /dev/hda by the dev file system :( .

I tried with some other livecd (gentoo 2006.0) to check, if it wasn’t a red hat issue and after some looking, I found I should have enabled some option in the computer bios.

Enabling that option will make the drive fully functional with gentoo(dma enabled, 50MB/S read rate) but now the drive is invisible for the red hat installer, i tried to load manually the kernel modules working under gentoo (libata/piixata), but still, it cant find my drive.

I than tried to install RH 4.2/4.3, getting a kernel panic on installation boot, "solved" by disabling Hyperthreading in bios. And so is finally well recognize my drive o.o"

Anyway, my problem is, I’m able to make it working under 4.2/4.3 environment, I need to install 4.0 on that pc, only supported environment to host the Websphere Application Server 6.0.

I can't reach the red hat web support, and I was wondering, having already running servers on that station, is there a way to patch it to make it work, or maybe upgrading the kernel package without losing data, or any other idea?

Going to be a bit of a problem as the kernel that comes with RHEL 4.0 does not have support for the SATA ICH7 controller as it is somewhat newer then when the kernel was built.

Two possible solutions, one is to check with the manufacturer and see if they have drivers for RHEL-4 available. The other is to install the updated from RHN and leave the currently installed kernel in place.

Test the server after the kernel update (reboot) and if good then your golden, if not then just re-boot to the older kernel.

To install the newer kernel (assuming you have it and have 'cd' to the location) type something like;rpm -ivh <the_name_of_the_kernel_filename(s)_here>

To figure out which kernel(s) you need type;

rpm -qa --qf="%{n}-%{v}-%{r}.%{arch}.rpm\n" 'kernel*' | sort

all right, thanks for your answer, im trying this in the morning ;)

so, here's some little feedback, i managed to upgrade my kernel package, using up2date, and booting the newer kernel will make my system unable to find the lvm device at all, im currently checking if the drive cannot be found because of a dev file name change from /dev/hda to /dev/sda or if it is not there anymore.

I was kind of hoping that the lvm drive could be mounted even with the drive dev filename changed as i'm able to mount it under gentoo livecd, even when recognized as /dev/sda, by launching a lvm drive scan.

At the same time, im building last stable kernel release from scratch (kernels.org) using my rh kernel config file, even if im prettye sure it wont work.

Any comment is welcome .... To be continued

The RH config file is not one to one compatible with the vanilla source so using the RH config file will only get you part of the way to get a working kernel. If possible (the preped RH kernel source required) use the RH config along side the vanilla config.

Many, many differences between the two, one of the biggest is netfilter. Please check everything during the configuration part before starting the building of the kernel and modules.

FYI: building a kernel for RH is a little bit different then the kernel rebuild guide the basic steps are;

make mrproper
make menuconfig (or gconfig or xconfig)
make
make module_install
make install

Which does work for me;

$ uname -a
Linux Aspire5000 2.6.17.7 #1 Tue Jul 25 11:26:01 EDT 2006 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Right, there i was just looking on configuring the Vanilla without loading RH config file, now it's working just fine, 60MB/S.

Big thanks for your help my friend :)