sata drives

totally_linux · 07-12-2006, 03:51 PM

does anyone know why my sata drive does not show up in my mandriva 2006 the ide drive does but i can not find my sata drive

thanks

pljvaldez · 07-12-2006, 04:07 PM

Most likely your SATA controller is not compiled into the stock kernel that comes with Mandriva 2006.

DuMont · 07-12-2006, 04:22 PM

I am very new to linux but have the same problem, i would just like to know. if it isn't compiled into the stock kernel, how to you go about doing this.

pljvaldez · 07-12-2006, 04:28 PM

There's a few ways you can sometimes get around this. One way is to temporarily change your SATA drive to PATA in the bios. Not all bios have this setting though. What it does is pretend that the drive is an IDE drive. Then once you've got it installed, you can recompile a new kernel from kernel.org and include your SATA controller. Then I believe you'll have to edit /etc/fstab and change all the /dev/hdaX to /dev/sdaX because when you boot your new kernel after changing the bios back, it'll be looking for SATA drives.

Short of that, you can remaster your install disk (complex and I've never done it before, but it involves recompiling a kernel and then putting that kernel onto the install CD) or pick a newer distro (I think a new Ubuntu family was released pretty recently). There might be a way to compile a module you could load at boot time, but I'm not sure how to do that either...

carlos88 · 07-13-2006, 08:13 AM

Intresting, that. I had a bit of trouble installing Slack or Debian because of this.
I have a Sata in primary master (ie SATA1), nothing in Secondary (ie other SATA2), a CDRW in Third Master (ie First IDE), and DVDRW in Fourth Master (ie Second IDE). After 30 seconds, booting hung after about a page of logging.
I went into Bios and noticed that the setting was set to SATA only (with optinos for PATA). I set it to PATA and SATA, then checked the drives. the CDR disappeared (presumably over-ridden by Hard drive on Sata), the Harddrive appeared on 2nd Primary I think, and the DVDRW appeared on first (or was it third?) Master.
Booted again, and success. It's all a bit messy, probably because of the way I set my system up. I think I'll put my CDRW as a slave to hard drive. Make life a t ad easier.