STATUS: Solved
SOLUTION: Post #5 and #7


Hi all.

My girlfriend wants to dual boot Windows XP and GNU/Linux (whopee). For more about that, see my general "convert my gf project" thread at https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=481503.

Naturally I'm all for that and want to help; the one thing I ran into is that no GNU/Linux I've run on her machine seems to acknowledge the existence of her hard drive.

I've plugged my own disk (debian) into it, and tried to mount something. It's a while ago (n month, ~2 <= n <= ~6), so I can't remember it.

Currently I'm running SuSE 9.2 live, and I've tried mounting /dev/hd* and /dev/sd*. The only thing that got mounted was /dev/hdc, which is the optical (GNU/cd/dvd/drwx+-/) drive. The error messages were all "mount: No medium found" or "mount: %s is not a valid block device".

Now, looking inside her box, I see the disk with a power cable and no IDE cable. So, I guess it's this new SATA thing I've been hearing about. Looking at the sticker on the case, I find the product name/model#, google for it, and find out that indeedy it is a SATA thingy (see the general get-my-girlfriend-switched thread, it links to the product page).

Searching the web for SATA and Linux, I find that genrally whether the disk is supported or not depends not on the disk but on the controller. Which raises the questions:

• How do I find out which controller is in my girlfriend's computer?
• How do I find out whether Linux supports that controller?
• How do I mount it?

Here's what I saw in the device manager on her current Windows XP installation:
Looking at properties of each, the only useful piece of information I could find is that the first controller is bus0, device18, function0, and the latter one is (0, 20, 1).

Here's an $(lspci) from SuSE:
If I do an lspci on knoppix, I also get these:
I google for "linux k8 northbridge", but find nothing that seems related.

I also google for "linux ST3200827AS" (the hard disk name) and "linux ST3200827AS 3.AHH" (the BIOS also says "3.AHH" on startup), but nothing useful seemed to come out of this.

Here I ran out of clue. What do I do to make Linux talk to my girlfriend's disk? How can I provide you with more information about my girlfriend's computer? If possible, bear in mind that all I have is knoppix 3.6dk, SuSE 9.2 and Ubuntu (4.10, IIRC) Live CDs, and the Ubuntu installation CD.

I'm afraid got some bad news for you. Motherboards based on the ATI chipset suck.
As usual ATI drivers suck. Actually MSI motherboards in general are'nt the best. There usually made up of cheap parts manufactured in taiwan, built with worse possible chipsets. Horribly ineffecient, overheating, banshee fan cooled chipsets. At first it was via, but now it looks ATI is aiming to be the new cream of the crap. I am biased I know. But this is based off of personal experience atleast.

I've had a bitch of time installing WINDOWS XP sp2 pro, for god sakes. This same chipset too. You know what I had to do? Well it turns out XP would'nt installed because the OEM included ati driver did'nt work. Blue screen of death during the actual install process. This never happened before to me. Even on the crappy via based boards.I actually had to downgrade to the original XP then do a friggin bottom-top installation. I had to use the standard ide driver. If i had sata drive, installation would've been damn near impossible, if at all.


I don't recommend using ANY os on boards based on this chipset. I don't mean to rant on ATI. But I'm being to feel like I could write an encylopedia on why they suck.
This whole AMD-ATI merger is frightening to me. I'm seriously considering to intel if this is the way things are going.

Get a board with nvida or intel chipset, please. Tell all your friends. Do whatever it takes to prevent this ATI nightmare.

Hmm... I'm sorta' leery about going "well, let's just drop this thing then". You tell an anecdote about installing windows, you generally rave about ATI being sucky, and go on to explain that the problem was because of the OEM.

I don't see how *that* puts me out of luck. I may actually be out of luck, but I'm not convinced. *Why* am I out of luck? What needs to happen for me to... get lucky (pun maybe-kinda'-sorta' not intended)? Why does that need to happen?

My point is if they can't provide adequate binary drivers for Windows, which is at the top of the food chain then chances are, their drivers for linux won't suck any less.

Right now your ati southbridge is failing miserably at IDE emulation. And you don't have any binary drivers that communicate natively with the chipset, so your drive won't be recognized.

Your only real hope of installing linux is to take the harddrive to a different motherboard.

If you used the latest stable 2.6.x kernel, the system should work. The only problem you may have is the SATA Seagate hard drive. SATA Seagate drives are a pain to set them in DMA mode. I recommend using PATA hard drives instead to ease the installation. I suggest using Gentoo because other distributions may not include ATI chipsets in the kernel. Install and setup Gentoo in VMware on your system and then copy the installation to your girl friend's computer.

slantoflight, the only reason why ATI is bad is because their software development is poor. Their hardware development is better than VIA and probably equal to nVidia and Intel. If ATI products are using 3rd party software, problems goes away. Xorg 7.0 should be able support most ATI video cards and maybe provide 3D hardware acceleration with out ever using ATI software. I have used an ATI Radeon 64 MB VIVO with Mandrake 8.1 and it did not crash like it did with Windows 98 using ATI drivers.

I'm not sure whether you know that SATA drives exist as /dev/sda or /dev/sdb etc, & the partitions are /dev/sda1, sda2 etc. They are mounted exactly the same way as ide drives except the device is different.

mounts the sda1 as ext3 filesytem on the data directory.

I hope this helps & that you don't have any problems with the ATI chip.

Electro: you make a good point about using ATI hardware with *3rd party* software--I figure I might do something in that direction, which was why I poked slantoflight to substantiate my lucklessness.

I'm currently downloading a newer version of knoppix (5.0.1) to try out. I might install it. I'm VERY hesitant towards installing gentoo on my girllfriend's computer. I think she would find it too complex. According to her, using the bookmarking feature of her browser is too complex.

As much as I would like her to go "look, honey, the ebuild is shit--they forgot a lot of dependencies causing compile errors, and the use flags are all wrong; I better fix this and submit a patch", I don't think she ever will.

Then again, I might have convinced myself that debian is easier for her than it really is, due to my heavy use and general geekyness.

Who knows, maybe I'll use her box as an experiment--if I had to switch, gentoo would probably be the one (or--maybe--kubuntu).

Worzel: I kinda guessed at sda--I have read man sd.

Everybody:
I tried mounting everything with knoppix <edit>3.6 (the old version)</edit>, and the only non-" is not a valid block device$" answer I got was for /dev/sda and /dev/hdc* (the latter being the cdrom drive). The response I got was that I needed to specify the FS type. But

Okay, so maybe the partition is fucked up, but windows can deal. I ran testdisk to see if it could work it out (having had good experience with it (due to bad experiences with fdisk) in the past). As far as I can make out, it says "read error" to every single read. I can at least make out that it iterates through all the cylinders (and it kinda' sorta' looks like it iterates through the heads and sectors). So, it's probably not a funky partitioning thing.

burned knoppix 5.0.1, popped it in, /mnt/sda shows up in /etc/fstabs and mounts without a problem. I copied all her data to my disk (yay, sshfs), so I should be good to go. I figure it was the outdated kernels of my live CDs. Thanks, Electro, for shoving me in this direction.

Also, should anyone be curious: I tried booting the old (3.6) knoppix with a 2.6 kernel, and it froze at reading from /dev/scd0, shortly after probing for USB/firewire devices--that is, a very short time after exiting the boot loader.

Anyways, problem solved. Thanks to everyone who posted.

jonaskoelker i like how you post with an eye catching text the status and solution of your problems. i should go back and edit mine but im too lazy, maybe ill just do it from now on.

Danmark eh? my Father was born there and i wish to visit someday.

Slantoflight, I agree with your view of ATI and it's MB chipset support. But all chipset makers had to start somewhere, including VIA! AMD buying ATI is actually a good thing. "Because it's not a merger." When a company wants to undermine another, it buys out its support and is no longer supported. ATI mainly made graphics chips for Intel Proces/chipsets. ATI has lost its Intel support since it is now owned by AMD. AMD's buying of ATI is a blow to Intel. All those people out there with onboard ATI video on their Intel based computers/ laptops will not see any immediate effects. But like the ugly duckling will more than likely be smothered under its mothers wing!

Sometimes words don't come easy...but when they do, it's inspiration and is spur of the moment!