Hi,

I have a asus p4p800 motherboard. The board has 2 pata slots and 2 sata slots...allowing for a total of 6 devices. My boot drive is the pata primary master. I just bought a sata drive and am trying to get this working in linux.

The first trouble I had was getting my system to boot. My bios has mode options "P-ATA", "S-ATA" and "P-ATA + S-ATA". "S-ATA" is the default option and it is _supposed_ to work. However, my machine refused to boot when in "S-ATA" mode. "P-ATA + S-ATA" mode didn't work either. So, I had to move to "P-ATA" mode.

Originally ("S-ATA" mode)

PM is pata device
PS
SM
SS
3M
4M is sata device

When moving to "P-ATA" mode, the bios seems to interchange the priority of the sata and pata slots. So, my sata device becomes the primary master and my pata device becomes the 3rd master.

Finally ("P-ATA" mode)

PM is sata device
SM
3M is pata device
3S
4M
4S

Anyway, I was able to get this to boot finally. I dualboot and tried linux first. There were major problems (understandably so I suppose)...something about IRQ 18 being disabled and me being told to reboot with the option irqpoll. I also had frequent dma_timer_expiry messages. In the end, the linux boot process took over 20 minutes and didn't seem to adjust too well to the bios swapping of my drivers. Windows on the other hand, after a short delay, seemed to handle it just fine.

Does anyone know why "P-ATA" is the only mode that works for me? And how do I get linux working again?