quick question, installed slack on a new sata drive last night, got everything up and running with custom kernel 2.6. still working on the ethernet apadater but so far so good.

my question pertains to dual booting with sata drives. in order to fdisk the correct sda device, i had to remove the other two sata drives. is dual booting just a matter of remapping the drives like i've done in the past with ide drives, or is this something different.

i have yet to plug in the other drives and just wondering what the best way to go about this would be.

Eh, there will only ever be *one* sda device ... having to remove the other SATA disks to fdisk it is confusing.

SATA1 = sda
SATA2 = sdb
SATA3 = sdc
SATA4 = sdd

So you should be able to have run cfdisk /dev/sdd, instead of removing the disks until you only have one, which will register as sda.

The dual boot situation with sata is exactly the same as the pata (ide) drives you had experience with, so long as lilo is installed at the MBR of the first disk that's read, you're all good to go! The only issue you might have is where Windows gets a bit confused (I assume you're dual booting windows? You don't say, explicity) and you have to give it some extra lilo parameters. There's another thread on this I'll dig up if necessary.

- Piete.

i have an asus a8n-sli dlx motherboard, and the issue i was having is that when attempting to use fdisk on sda, it would open up as sdap1 sdap2 and sdap3, p1 being primary drive and p2 being secondary and so forth. not only that but the drive information was way off, primary is 30gb, secondary is 25gb and sdap3 was like 82gb. between all 3 drives i have more than 500gb, so i knew something was wrong, this was alleviated once i disconnected the other two drives. i tried booting in both sata.i and huge26.s, both had the drives show up the same way. been reading through a lot of pages and saw several similar issues as what i was having. something about the irq from the sata drives.


and yes, the secondary drive is a windows drive, used for when i hava an urge to play certain games, (rarely). but i remember having to map-drive=0x080 to 0x081 and 0x081 to 0x080 to alleviate the windows issues associated with windows being a secondary drive, so i'll still be able to accomplish this in a sata setup right?

On the Windows map-drive thing: yes that's exactly what I was thinking of.

On the sata IRQ issue, I'm going to have to take a back seat because I've only every used one sata drive at a time. I was under the impression it ran rather like memory cards, which *do* come up as sda, sdb, etc, so more fool me eh!

If you're having irq issues then I recommend you start looking into bios options and updates; especially the options. Perhaps someone else could give an idea on that.

Oh oh, did you check dmesg and /var/log/messages from the boot up with more than one SATA drive? See what they returned? I'd grep them both for sd* and post the results if you're unsure what you're looking at (you sound like you lack confidence in what you do, but not the ability to do it!).

Also might be worth running Knoppix and other live CDs, see what their dmesg makes of your drive set up.

My first port of call would be google + bios checks.

Anyway, let us know!
- Piete.

alright, so i figured out that i needed to update my bios, i updated the bios to the newest version, and reinstalled slack. all of my drives were showing up sda/sdb/sdc.

So now that i've gone through the re-install, I am getting a kernel panic error; not syncing: no init found. Error says to try passing init= option to kernel. This is where I am currently stuck. Any help is greatly appreciated.

My guess is that you've not got got your FS built into the kernel, so it's a module, and you've not got an initrd! Take a look, let us know =)

- Piete.

yes, but i received this message directly after a fresh install/formatting entire disk. would the default kernels from the slack disk really have the filesystem not built into the kernel?

Ok, I don't know how helpful this is, but I thought I'd mention it. I have the same motherboard in one of my workstations, and the sata drives never come up correctly. Right now I have the drives in a different order than what the motherboard is labeled. On the main sata ports, port 3=1, 4=2, 2=3, and 1=4 (I believe). They don't show correctly in the bios, but Linux recognizes them now and I stopped having kernel panics. Also, the issue only seems to arise with more than one disk installed. If you have more than one drive, you might try it to see if it works, the only other thing is that Windows might not work correctly (I couldn't tell you from experience though).


For what it's worth, I've tried updating the BIOS, reinstalling, RMA'ing the board and hard drives, and nothing seemed to work except that.

Hope that helps a bit,

-David

yea, i noticed that too, sata 1 = 2, sata 3 = 1, sata 2 = 3, very wierd, also noticed that windows refuses to load from lilo, no matter what instructions are passed to it. booting into windows is currently being done using the mobos drive boot option (F8 during bios screen, lets you choose primary disc to boot from), so that is my currect work around to the lilo issue.


it seem that i can boot into slack if i install first then add in the other drives (so that it can't see the other drives), and then everything seems to work fine, otherwise i keep getting kernel panics regardless of the FS that i choose to install with.

I'm having similar problems, but I kthink I know what my problem is. The setup software for the Western Digital Drive I'm trying to use specifically states that it won't work for dual booting. Perhaps if you were to go back to your setup software for your particular drive, you might find that you have the same situation. The manufacturers don't tell you on the packaging that it won't work, so you have no way of knowing till you take off the shrinkwrap and start the installation.
Then, it's too late to take the drive back. BS!

Just a thought.

i have 2 80 gig sata drives on asus mb using via8237 driver. had to use grub for dual boot. dunno if that helps. lilo just wasn't stable with them for some reason.