I just grabbed a new HP Pavilion with Athlon64 and it has SATA drives in it.

Trying to install RH ES4 (x86_64) and during the initial (pre Anaconda) dialogs, it complains that it didn't find any hard disks, so I have to select a driver to add.

I've tried adding every SATA driver I could find listed, but none seem to do the job...when I get to the Disk Druid step, it fails because it says there's no where to install RH.

I've tried inspecting the mobo for clues to exactly which SATA controller is on it, but haven't come up with anything solid (there's nVIDIA graphics on the mobo, so I'm theorizing that's the SATA controller too).

The mobo must be specially made for HP, because ASUS doesn't list it on their site, even though the darn thing is brand new.

Appreciate any tips/tricks on getting RH up-and-running on this new box.

Thanks in advance,
AJ

you might try going into the bios and enabling "pata" mode for the drives. it should then be recognized by the standard ata driver.

alternatively, you could boot in expert noprobe mode and manually choose a driver that supports your particular sata setup. i believe you sholud choose ahci (advanced host controller interface).

alternatively.2, compile a kernel with sata support and rebuild the install cd. this is doable yet tedious if you're just doing one machine, but useful if installing a whole cluster of machines.

Hi,

I had a similar problem and to get the installation working I had to go into the BIOS and tell the machine to look older ATA drives. After that I was able to get the installation going. However, now I have a drive that is not running with all the advantages a SATA drive should, but at least changing the BIOS helped with the initial problem. So in short, if you change the BIOS you should at least get farther.

-NifferX

Unfortunately, they're hiding that option if it's there at all. So that won't help.

Thanks anyway,
AJ

It may be simpler to install a distro that can recognise a Sata. Most recent distros with 2.6 kernels or above have no probloem of being installed into a Sata.

Saikee,

Do you know if the newest Red Hat recognizes SATA? I just installed Red Hat Enterprise WS 4 and had to change the BIOS away from the default RAID or AHCI to SATA/PATA in order to get the drive to be read by the installer. However, now the drive is mounted on /dev/hda instead of /dev/sda and is being accessed extremely slowly.

-NifflerX

My Red Hat 9 can recognise a Sata and it has 2.4.20 kernel. From memory I believe officially 2.6 kernels and above can accept Sata. Red Hat 9 was the last version. The current Red Hat is Fedora Core which has no problem with Sata since FC2 from my records.

I have Fedora Core 4 installed in Sata, together with rPath 0.51, Scientific Linux 4.0, Mandriva 2006 0.4, Slackware 10, Zenwalk 1.2, Mepis 3.3.2

Hi,

Thanks for the response. I was actually able to solve it. What I did was update my binaries. Apparently my binary CDs of Red Hat were kernel 2.6.9-5, so I downloaded the newest ones from Red Hat 2.6.9-22 and when I went to install it saw my drive as a SATA drive without a problem. Thanks.

-NifflerX