Hope this should be in hardware - sorry if it shouldn't be. I have an Asus A7V600 mb and I want to boot off my S-ATA drive but I'm having huge trouble finding drivers!!! I need this up asap!! :'( Can someone please point me in the right direction. I'm running Redhat 9. Thanks

"Can someone please point me in the right direction."

The drivers are manufacturer and model specific. Look for drivers for your IDE chipset and your hard drive. They may or may not already be in the kernel.

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Steve Stites

If I'm not mistaken that board uses the same via chipset I've got on my Biostar IDEQ 200V. If that's correct, all you need is kernel 2.4.22-ac4, or just the ac4 patch if you're already running 2.4.22. Kernel 2.6 (I've used test9 and test10) will also do it. The trick is configuring your kernel and, if you want to boot from the SATA drive, transferring your installation.

I'm running Slackware 9.1 and it took me several tries. I installed on an old 20 Gig drive, upgraded my kernel to 2.6test9 and was able to see and use the SATA drive. I copied the installation to the SATA drive and tried to boot from it, but no joy. Tried a couple of different times.

I reinstalled Slackware, downloaded the 2.4.22 source, patched it with the ac4 patch, compiled and again I could see the drive. This time I tried a different method to copy the installation (dd the whole drive instead of copying directory by directory), changed the fstab to reflect a different drive setup, changed lilo to boot from that kernel and booting worked.

A couple of things to know: the via SATA driver is listed in the SCSI drivers section of the configuration program (I used xconfig). The funny thing is, when I was using 2.6test, the drive showed up as hard drive hde, but when I used 2.4.22ac4 it showed up as hard drive sda.

The Seagate drive I have attached (80 gig, 8 MB cache) shows up as faster than my old 20 gig Maxtor ATA 66 drive when I run hdparm tests, but in actual use I don't see much difference. I attribute this to Slackware, which is just the holy hot momma born-again golden dookie. It really is noticeably faster than Red Hat 9, which I used for a couple of months. Then again, you have to do a lot more yourself.

Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Feel free to e-mail me directly if you have any questions.

Have fun,

joe f.

- have same problem with ASUS A7V600 motherboard, Seagate ST380023AS SATA drive, VIA chipset.

ASUS CD-ROM supplies only Windows drivers. Seagate says they don't know about Linux, ditto computer manufacturer (ABS).

Neither Red Hat 9 nor Mandrake 9 recognizes the disk, so I cannot install, much less recompile the kernel.

It seems what is needed is a driver, in the right format, for ANACONDA to pick up? Does anyone know whether such a driver exists?

Since there are more and more SATA disks, I would think that some future distro will work, but for the time being, I am stopped cold.

Thanks biffle

The only installer I've seen that recognizes my drive (or probably the drive controller) is an experimental Gentoo Live CD here that has a 2.6 kernel. I got up to a working kernel with that, but as you know, Gentoo is source-based and I couldn't get a working graphical desktop. Kept running into compiling problems. Then I got the slackware install working on my SATA drive and stopped fiddling with Gentoo. I'm sure somebody else must have an install that works, but I haven't found it yet. It'd neet to be at least 2.4.22-ac4 or 2.6test something. I'm not sure if 2.4.23 would work or not.

If you run into one that works please post back, as I'm keeping a nice-sized partition empty for one.

Thanks,

joe f.

" I'm not sure if 2.4.23 would work or not. "

Kernel 2.4.23 has everything that 2.4.22-ac4 has, plus. So if 2.4.22-ac4 works then 2.4.23 should also work.

"The funny thing is, when I was using 2.6test, the drive showed up as hard drive hde, but when I used 2.4.22ac4 it showed up as hard drive sda. "

One of the improvements in 2.6.0 is that the ide-scsi interface is eliminated from the kernel. The idea is that all IDE devices will use 100% IDE interface instead of some using IDE and some using ide-scsi. I read that Linus had to put the ide-scsi interface back into 2.6.0, at least temporarily, because cdrecord has not converted from ide-scsi to IDE yet.

___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites