trouble with promise sata378 scsi controller

Hey guys. I'm at my wits end here so I am turning the one place that has always helped me in the past. Here is my delima:

I just purchased a new Alienware Area-51m 7700 laptop. It has a Promise SATA378 scsi controller in it and a Hitachi HTE72606 scsi drive.

The laptop came with WinXP installed from the factory, but I want to dual boot with linux, preferrably Mandrake or Fedora, but at this point I really don't care. I've tried installing Mandrake 10.1 and 10.0, Fedora Core 3, SuSE 9.2 and Slackware 10.0 all with no luck. None of them can see my hard drive during the install process. Mandrake and Fedora both try to load the sata_promise driver automatically (which I think is the right one), but when I try to continue the installation they both fail saying something like "no device found to write to". I can post the exact error message if needed.

I *really* don't want to be stuck running Windoze so if anyone has any input at all on this I would really appreciate it.

Thanks in advance.

I could not find any specific info on that model number via Promise's website. I also could not find any info on the drive via Hitachi website. I do not think the drive is a SCSI device.

I know, I couldn't find any info on promise's site either, but the invoice I received from Alienware says the hard drive is a scsi, and under the windows device manager, it is listed as a scsi drive. I just installed FreeBSD and it recognized the drive just fine, but I don't want to stick with this distro as it seems to be radically different from the other distros I've used.

From dmesg on FreeBSD:

atapci0: <Promise PDC20378 SATA150 controller> ...
atapci0: failed: rid 0x20 is memory, requested 4
ata2: channel #0 on atapci0
ata3: channel #1 on atapci0
ata4: channel #2 on atapci0
...
...
atapci1: <GENERIC ATA controller>
...
...
ad8: 57231MB <HTE726060M9AT00/MH4OA6AA> [116280/16/63] at ata4-master UDMA100
...
....
Mounting root from ufs:/dev/ad8s2a

It looks like FreeBSD recognizes the controller as SATA150 instead of SATA378 which is what the BIOS reports it as. I would include the entire output from dmesg but FreeBSD didn't recognize my network adapter, so I have to type the message from another machine. Hope this helps someone out there troubleshoot this problem.

Thanks.

I've also successfully installed RedHat 9. Promise has a driver on their website for RedHat 9. Is the support for this controller just not up to par in the newer 2.6.x kernel? I would like to use a newer distro than this, so again, any help would be appreciated.

Hey, I have almost identical config as far as controller goes (Promise SATA378), and have exact same problem. Posted on Fedora mailing list and here but nobody is replying.
Tried to run controller in ATA mode and in Raid mode with no luck. I read somewhere that kernel needs libata besides sata_promise. Not sure if this is correct. If it is how would i know if the installer loads that, and if it doesn't, how would i load it during install?
If you figure it out please let me know, I'll do the same.
Thnx

I think libata is what RedHat 9 loads for the controller. I think I remember seeing this message in the boot message. The SATA150 TX2 plus RedHat driver on promise's web site is what I ended up using to get RedHat 9 installed. I've been reading up on initrd and I'm wondering if I can use these same drivers and create a initrd to use to install another distro, such as Mandrake or Fedora 3. I would rather run one of these distros. The problem is I don't know how to do this for a fresh install. Everything I've read on initrd is for a system that already has linux installed. Anyone out there know if I'm going down the right path looking at initrd?

Does the fact that RH9 is kernel 2.4 and FC3 is 2.6 matter? Promise website tells that the driver is for kernel 2.4.
During install i do see it loading sata_promise driver, so i wonder weather the driver is broken or it needs something else loaded to see the drive attached to the controller. If I was a kernel guru, I would try to compile those drivers as modules, boot something like Knoppix with 2.6 kernel and try loading those things until it would recognize the drive. But since I have no clue where to even begin I am sol
If there is anybody out there who can get me started I sure would be open to learn.

I just received my laptop yesterday and google'd across this thread among many others. We're not alone. Here are some applicable links I've found so far. It looks like the dmraid module is what we're after here. I let you know if I figure it out. I believe we should share any interesting URL's in hopes of pooling our resources a little better.

http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html
http://wiki.debian.net/?DebianInstallerFAQ
http://tienstra4.flatnet.tudelft.nl/~gerte/gen2dmraid/
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/...cf436a264a681c

Please post your solution if you figure it out before I do.

Good Luck!

Unfortunately the dmraid didn't work for the sata378 raid config in my alienware m7700 laptop. I've tried the latest debian "sarge" snapshot iso and the other big 5 or so distros with no luck.

Clerarly, I'm going to have to build a custom kernel and initrd to get this thing working. The problem is my old linux laptop took a crap so I have to work on winblows with cygwin. Not happening.

Anyone have any luck or leads. Anything?

I, too, have just recieved an Alienware Area-51m 7700 laptop, and want to install Fedora Core 3. It has the Promise SATA PDC20378 controller, which Fedora's installer does not recognize. Last night, I successfully generated a boot "disk" (actually, a pen drive with a ~6MB image, I recommend using a pen drive in order to avoid making CD coasters) that recognized the drive. The process involved information concerning "oeri"'s post at http://notebookforums.com/archive/in...p/t-50624.html stamped 01-12-2005, 06:23 PM. In particular, I had to recompile the kernel using kernel-2.6.10-1.741_FC3.src.rpm from http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pu...41_FC3.src.rpm and the 2.6.10-bk9-libata-dev1.patch from http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kern...dev1.patch.gz. I then followed the instructions at http://sole.infis.univ.trieste.it/~d...rh_bdisk.html, except instead of just dropping in new modules in the modules.cgz cpio archive, I had to create a new directory structure and place the modules in 2.6.10-1.741_FC3/i586/*.

The kernel recompilation was a little tricky. I had to tweak the spec file to include the new patch, ignore the -smp variant, and modify the *.config so that it had good values for CONFIG_SCSI_ATA_ADMA and CONFIG_SCSI_PATA_PDC2027X. I had to tweak the patch to avoid some of the previously applied sections, siince rpmbuild does not want to see such a thing happen.

Anyway, after all the mount -o loop's, cpio's, and dd's, the pen-drive booted the laptop and allowed Fedora's installer to see my hard drive. Hopefully, I'll now be able to install the OS and update the kernel before it reboots and tries to run on its own.

Wish me luck. If this works, I'll generate more detailed instructions/binaries (assuming I can upload them somewhere).

--Jim

Because of time constraints, I installed Suse 9.1 and the Fastrak driver from promise and it works well. Unfortunately, I'm a debian guy and I am just waiting for some time to fix the problem officially rather than being locked into a proprietary binary driver and target distro...and promise's hideously slow release schedule. Ps. Suse 9.2 will NOT work with the promise suse 9.1 driver at all...

I'm interested in seeing your final resolution. If I get some time I'll try to jump back in.

Tyler

Yes, thanks for your post Twinkel. I'll be looking forward to hearing more from you. I would really prefer to put either slackware or mandrake on mine, but I will settle for Fedora if I have to. Having to suffer with Winblowz right now

I've made a little more progress. Using the pen drive image, I was able to boot and start the installation procedure. At first, I booted with "linux rescue", initialized my net connection, and resized my NTFS partition with the statically-linked ntfsresize at http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/...atic-1.9.4.tgz then rewrote my partition table, etc. That worked well, and my Windows system is now constrained to 10 GB (just enough for bzflag and some breathing room).

Secondly, I rebooted and progressed through the normal Fedora install process. For some reason, though, the installation process was unable to automatically partition with its fancy LVM setup that it tries to do (wierd, since I successfully installed with the LVM on an ancient laptop). So, I've had to manually partition the drive for the installation process. I performed a minimal install and was even able to hit ctrl-alt-f2 right before the installation process wanted to reboot, bring the ethernet interface up, and copy over a modified kernel RPM and install it.

Unfortunately, I wiped the drive on my old laptop before actually extracting the full-blown, functional kernel RPM. I had to work with one that I tried to reconstruct on a bastardized RedHat 9.0 machine, but I think I did something wrong there, since the kernel was not capable of loading its modules. Luckily, I could extract the functional kernel and modules from the pen drive, but the system is still not set up quite right (missing the /lib/modules/*/build directory tree and all of the /lib/modules/*/modules.* files). Hopefully, I'll be able to construct a good RPM using the FC3 install I have on another machine (unfortunately, it's a 475MHz laptop with maybe 256MB, the fan is broken so it has to be under-clocked, and it keeps going to sleep even though I've told it not to). Or maybe I'll do a full install (or "developer" install?) on the new machine and live with the "linux rescue" boot process until I can create a functional kernel RPM.

Anyhow, as per oeri's post, the libata patch works great! I have seen no problems, and it's completely open source. I'm not sure what the equivalent process is for Mandrake or Slackware. I imagine it's quite similar. Hopefully, Fedora will tide you over until the distros start including the libata patch by default (Fedora already includes some of the hunks. I'm not sure how they got some but decided to omit the others). I have ~18 days left before XP wants me to activate it. I've set that as my goal for being comfortable with my Linux installation. If I'm far enough along at that time, I think I might even wipe XP, use that partition for a full Fedora installation, and use the remaining space for my home directories.

One wrinkle of note: the initrd image that the final installation uses is a gzipped cpio archive, SVR4 format with no CRC (as generated by cpio -H newc -o | gzip) whereas the initrd image on the boot disk is a gzipped ext2 filesystem. That's odd that they changed, but I think I like the cpio archive better. If you start making extensive modification to an ext2 filesystem, eventually it doesn't compress as well since it doesn't wipe old inodes clean. It's such a pain to have to dd if=/dev/zero, mke2fs, mount -o loop, and cp -R *every* time you make a change in order to get a nice, compressible fs. The cpio archive is re-created (easily) every time, compresses well, and is only the size that it needs to be.

Okay. I've gotten Fedora Core 3 installed on my laptop, despite the PDC20378. The main trick was the libata patch, and being able to rebuild the kernel on a reasonable, pre-existing Linux installation (in this case, I used Fedora Core 3 on my new laptop by relying on booting with the pen drive image I had made before I wiped my old Fedora Core 2 install on the previous laptop, whew... that was close).

Fedora Core 3 was not able to detect my video card (I guess the GeForce Go 6800 was too new for the version of Xorg provided), but I was able to acquire and install the latest Xorg, which *does* support it (chipset 0x00c8 was added on 8/26/2005). Also, the wireless ethernet was not supported out of the box, but getting the latest CVS source for MADWiFi (as described here: http://madwifi.sourceforge.net/ ) worked with a simple "make && make install".

Now, I'm off to try to get sound working (I have an intel ICH6 Family audio system on the motherboard), as well as DRI, so bzflag frame rates rise above 0.5. For those of you that are keeping score at home, Fedora Core 3 did not properly support:

1) My Promise PDC20378 SATA controller
2) My GeForce Go 6800 video card
3) My Atheros AR5212 WiFi card
4) My intel ICH6 audio controller

That's not very impressive performance from an O/S... Maybe I should look at some of the other distros? Or is the hardware I have just too new?

Appended below is a uuencoded, gzipped patch that I apply to Fedora's stock kernel-2.6.*-1.*_FC3.src.rpm while in /usr/src/redhat. In particular, I say:

rpm -Uvh kernel-2.6.10-1.760_FC3.src.rpm
cd /usr/src/redhat
zcat kernel-2.6.x-src.RPM.patch.gz | patch -p0
rpmbuild --target i586 SPECS/kernel-2.6.spec

The patch contains the portion of the libata patch which is not already included in the Fedora Core version of the kernel, it modifies the *.spec file to include the patch, and it modifies the *.config files to define the newly introduced build options. It should work on many of the 2.6 kernel source RPMs (until more hunks of the libata patch are incorporated by the Fedora folks).

[patch removed... too many images... anyone know where I can upload some of this stuff?]

Keep up the good work Twinkel! I'm following along with all of your posts. It seems you are the only one out there with a similar setup as I. I think my hardware is basically the same as yours. I have the same video card as you, but I think my sound controller may be different. What is the max resolution you've achieved with Xorg? As soon as you get the patch uploaded somewhere I am going to try and install FC3 myself. If you send your me your email address to cboyd1472@hotmail.com I can send you the address to my ftp server so you can upload the patch so I can try it. Sorry, I don't want to make it publically available to everyone :P