How do I use a parallel ATA drive on a serial ATA controller?

sigmaris · 03-18-2004, 04:26 PM

I have a AOpen AK77-8X Max motherboard with an onboard Promise 20375 Serial ATA controller (also seems to be called TX2Plus) and 3 Parallel ATA (like normal IDE) channels. As well as the normal primary and secondary channels, which are controlled by the IDE controller on the southbridge, there is a third IDE channel which, according to the block diagram in the motherboard manual, is controlled by the serial ATA controller.
So the serial ATA chip is controlling two serial ATA ports and one IDE channel. Now, I don't have any Serial ATA drives, but I do have an IDE hard drive attached to the third IDE channel, and I want to use it in Linux. I'm using a 2.6.4 kernel that I compiled myself, and I enabled SCSI support and then Serial ATA support for the Promise chipset in the SCSI sub-menu in the kernel config. (the serial ATA driver in the kernel seems to be considered a scsi driver, or some kind of scsi emulation driver). When I boot up these messages appear which seem to be coming from the Promise Serial ATA driver:

Code:

libata version 1.01 loaded.
sata_promise version 0.91
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xD183D200 ctl 0xD183D238 bmdma 0x0 irq 11
ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xD183D280 ctl 0xD183D2B8 bmdma 0x0 irq 11
ata1: no device found (phy stat 00000000)
ata1: thread exiting
scsi0 : sata_promise
ata2: no device found (phy stat 00000000)
ata2: thread exiting
scsi1 : sata_promise

I think this means that the driver has detected the serial ATA chip, and sure enough there's an entry in /proc/interrupts for "libata" and some in /proc/iomem for "sata_promise" which show that the driver's assigned interrupts and stuff ok (I think) but.. I can't access the drive at all

/dev/sda, /dev/sdb etc don't seem to exist, and neither do /dev/hde, /dev/hdf etc. Also, /proc/scsi/scsi, which i think is supposed to show attached scsi devices, just shows

Code:

Attached devices:

Does the serial ATA driver not support parallel ATA drives? The drive works fine on Windows XP, although windows detects it as a SCSI drive, you can read and write to it fine. I know this is a pretty technical question, but has anyone experience of a similar problem?

AutOPSY · 03-19-2004, 04:23 AM

Line breaks are like miracles to readers.

slartablartfast · 08-21-2004, 07:41 PM

Did this probel ever get resolved? I have the same issue. I have looked at the kernel files. not documented for anything very very frustrating. and why would soem one be so rude as to respond to a post only with a stupid comment like the previous. this site is about help not insults. must be a script kiddie