Additional SATA drives not visible to kernel FC6

I have just built a Duo based system on an Intel 965 MBoard. It has an 80Gb drive on SATA port 1 and 2 32Gb SATA drives one each on ports 3 and 4.

I followed the various instructions to actually install FC6 i.e. setting the BIOS SATA mode to AHCI and adding all-generic-ide and pci=nommconf to the kernel options.

The system is running fine on the 80Gb drive but doesn't even see the 2 320s. I am guessing that as this is a new chipset, the kernel 2.6.18-1.2849.fc6 doesn't yet have appropriate drivers. I hope I am wrong and there is some tweak I can make to get the other drives up.

The drives are brand new Seagate SATA, ST3320620AS.

I did note that if I set the BIOS SATA type to IDE, the 3 drives appeared on the various ports. But trying to use them in this manner resulted in an unknown IDE controller message from the kernel and DMA timeouts and lost interrupts. With the type set to AHCI, all ports say 'not installed'.

ahci 0000:00:1f.2: AHCI 0001.0100 32 slots 4 ports 3 Gbps 0x33 impl SATA mode
ahci 0000:00:1f.2: flags: 64bit ncq led clo pio slum part
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF8840100 ctl 0x0 bmdma 0x0 irq 58
ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF8840180 ctl 0x0 bmdma 0x0 irq 58
ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF8840200 ctl 0x0 bmdma 0x0 irq 58
ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF8840280 ctl 0x0 bmdma 0x0 irq 58
scsi0 : ahci
ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
ata1.00: ATA-6, max UDMA/133, 156301488 sectors: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
ata1.00: ata1: dev 0 multi count 16
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
scsi1 : ahci
ata2: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
scsi2 : ahci
ata3: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 0)
scsi3 : ahci
ata4: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 0)
Vendor: ATA Model: ST380817AS Rev: 3.42
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05
SCSI device sda: 156301488 512-byte hdwr sectors (80026 MB)

According to the 2.6.19 changelog from kernel.org, there was a patch for the ICH8 in October.

commit 158f30c8945fea7cf0d0161cd9463cf2f3d2c19e Author: Kristen Carlson Accardi <kristen.c.accardi@intel.com> Date: Thu Oct 19 13:27:39 2006 -0700 [PATCH] libata: use correct map_db values for ICH8 Use valid values for ICH8 map_db. With the old values, when the controller was in Native mode, and SCC was 1 (drives configured for IDE), any drive plugged into a slave port was not recognized. For Combined Mode (and SCC is still 1), 2 is a value value for MAP.map_value, and needs to be recognized. Signed-off-by: Kristen Carlson Accardi <kristen.c.accardi@intel.com> Signed-off-by: Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>

I doubt that this patch made it in to FC6 release. YOu might check to see if there is an updated kernel for FC6.

I have upgraded to the 2.6.19 kernel from fedora-testing, it hasn't made any difference. I have also updated the BIOS to the latest for this mboard from the Intel Website, that didn't make any difference either.

A colleague suggested ignoring this issue and installing a 3ware (or similiar) SATA RAID card and fix things that way. I haven't done so but it is an interesting option, just costs money!

Success at last.

Upgrading to the latest BIOS from Intel and then upgrading to the latest 2.6.20 FC6 kernel and voila I now have access to my additional disks.

The BIOS introduced a 'legacy' IDE which is what I believe fixed things.

I am no longer using the generic-ide kernel option.

Strangely I have now lost the CD Drive :-( at this time, the addiiton SATA drives are more important.

So you lost your CD too? I recently saw another post by someone who ran into the same issue after upgrading to 2.6.20. This is beginning to look like a bug. I guess I'd better not do the upgrade myself.

Btw, what happens if you do use all-generic-ide? Doesn't that turn up the IDE controller/CD?

I was pushed for time when I did the upgrade, I started at 4:00am and this is a production server.

I removed the kernel options to see if they were needed for the SATA drives, discovering that they were not, I didn't put them back. I discovered the CD-Rom not working a few days later and not wanting to lose my SATA drives again, I haven't played around trying to get it to go.