I recently ordered a new machine and for various reasons that now look pretty stupid, I ordered it with a SATA motherboard and drive. I am in a panic because this machine arrives today and must be ready to go on Monday morning. (Yes, I know I am stupid.)

Before I embark on a bootless quest to install linux on this machine, can anyone tell me whether I will be able to get the SATA driver working?

Here's the basic description of the card:

DFI PS83BL, 865PE, Dual-DDR400, AGP 8X w/Audio,LAN,SATA

Though I cannot post the url, the manufacturer's website has a basic description of the card and a pdf of the manual. The manual flatly states that the only OS that supports hyperthreading is XP.

I am excruciatingly sorry that I am an idiot, but I would be grateful for any help.

I should also have listed the drive model. It is a Seagate 80 GB, 7200 RPM, Serial ATA, w/ 8 MB Cache. Model number ST380023AS.

Hmmmm. I suppose one possibility is that this drive and motherboard are so obviously supported that this is a stupid question. Another is that no one knows the answer.

LINUX will see hyperthreading as two processors but the kernel has to be compiled for SMP or multiple processor support. IMO, I still think hyperthreading is a gimmick. You can never replace two processors for one.

Installing LINUX on SATA is bit tricky. I suggest you buy parrallel hard drive. This drive doesn't have to be the best because you are going to just install LINUX on it and then copy it to the SATA drive. You need to make sure you compile the kernel to include your SATA controller before removing the parallel drive completely.

You will have some trouble setting your Seagate for DMA. Western Digital SATA drives known as Raptor are much better and they have near SCSI reliablity and they are easier to setup for DMA.

I can help you out with the SATA issue, but really cant help you out with the hyperthreading. According to your post you have the 875P chipset from intel. This has the silicon image chipset. all u have to do is make a bootdisk with a precompiled kernel image using 2.4.21-ac4. u can do this with 'make syslinux.' make sure the kernel has SCSI enabled and make sure that the under ATA in the kernel config that the SI chipset is enabled and the intel PIIX is enabled. next go to the .config file. open it and enable the following lines in the SCSI section(ive heard these options exist in the kernel but havent checked it out myself). add the lines CONFIG_BLK_DEV=y
CONFIG_SCSI_ATA=y
CONFIG_SCSI_ATA_PIIX=y
save it and compile the image, then throw it on a floppy and boot your system. thats should do the trick.

that's good news for me

i got 2x raptor SATA drive plus 2x 200 gig western dightal IDE drive, going to dual boot and i also got hyperthreaded 2.8c so that's good news.

anyway so all i got to do is upon installation enable SATA and SMP so linux can use both feature, well that sounds cool to me, anyway i'm going to be doing an gentoo install so i probably won't need to use the IDE drive, just load up the SATA module and stuff then before i reboot just compile that support into the kernal or something.

back to the original post though, the line "I am excruciatingly sorry that I am an idiot" suggests low self esteem, and frankly, a lack of awareness of the weakness of the human condition. even if its not easy to match bits of hardware you can always do it with linux, if you don't know how to you will just have to find out. I believe that is what linux is about.

good luck.

SATA with Linux Redhat 9.0

Ive read your post to Electro about installing Linux with an SATA HDD. I'm sort of in the same situation. My job has ordered 3 state of the art PC as per my recommendation. Now when I try to load Redhat 9.0 from boot CD it ask my to choose a driver. The only thing is the driver is not in the list. I've found that I have a Seagate 120GB 8MB Cache SATA Hard Drive (HDT001007-00) with an Intel ICH5R Chip set. Intel does not have Linux drivers for the HDD yet, it only supports 2000/XP. Please if you know of anything or anybody that could help me.... Please. Or I will loose face and tell them to ship back these really fast PC for IDE or EIDE so I could load linux. P.S I hear this is going to be the new technology. This really sucks because I found that these drive only give an 1-5% performance ratio, over the PATA. This type of hardware is mostly to save space and cables. Dah... Please if you can help me..

I can only report that a friend of mine has a 865PE mobo with SATA
diabled, using a Maxtor ATA 133 drive on the ATA 100 ide provided by Intel.
RH9 in the hardware support list tells nothing about ICH5 support,
I think this new tech will be included somehow in the new RH9 kernels. BTW, 2.4.20-20.9 does not seem to include any support,
I have heard about 2.4.21 or more, but I am not a kernel compile fan,
so I'll wait.

Hope it helps,

Good. Luck.

PS : Even if Linux support comes later, it always better !