amd64 sata

joshmead1 · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2004 Posts: 1

Im trying to find a distro that will let me install to my sata harddrive. I was wondering does the latest gentoo for amd64 see sata harddrives on install or am i going to have to figure something else out?

Kioshen · Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2004 5:59 pm Post subject:

They are seeing sata drives. You have to make sure you enable sata support in the scsi's low level driver of the 2.6 kernel when you compile it. Here are the status of sata controllers :

Go see this page for more info :

http://dev.gentoo.org/~brad_mssw/amd64-tech-notes.html

krakrjak · n00b Joined: 08 Feb 2004 Posts: 20

Kioshen · Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2004 2:51 pm Post subject:

I'm using the promise controller on my asus K8V and I have no problem at all. I even made a software raid1 array with lvm in it. Talk about a major puzzle. Maybe don't put the promise controller in raid mode but normal mode. That could help.

Where do you have errors, when building the distro ? How did you setup your controller bios ?

krakrjak · n00b Joined: 08 Feb 2004 Posts: 20

well we've finally decided to just go with PATA for now due to time pressures to get the server up. But the problem is that under any disk activity using a 64-bit kernel + userland eventually(usually a matter of seconds) kernel hardlocks. Sometimes there is an oops sometimes there isn't but it is always a hardlock.

Easy way for me to duplicate it.... the disk has 3 partitions /boot, swap, / easy enough. /dev/sda1,/dev/sda2,/dev/sda3. All I have to do is run 'mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda3' and it fails very early in writing the superblocks.

Every time... Whether it's from a livecd or a working PATA installation. this is a PDC20378 the motherboard is a Tyan Thunder K8S (s2880). The drive is a Seagate 120GB drive.

Ideas??? I'd love to have SATA if only for webstorage/ftp mirrors

roarkh · Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2004 5:50 am Post subject:

I'm not sure about the Promise controller but the VIA-8237 controller on my MSI K8T Neo motherboard is working perfectly with a 120gb Seagate SATA hard drive.

hdparm -t /dev/sda# returns 45mb to 55mb per second transfer rates depending on the location of the specified partition, about 10mb per second faster than the results I was getting on my Athlon XP 2000+ box with Seagate 60gb EIDE hard drive.

-Roark

krakrjak · n00b Joined: 08 Feb 2004 Posts: 20

We went with a Western Digital 80 Gig drive that has an 8MB cache. It shows very similar speeds.

We will also add that drive's cousin the 250 Gig version soon as we put it into production.

BoW · Posted: Thu Feb 19, 2004 1:20 am Post subject:

Had problems with crazy failures and kernelpanics with my Promise SATA too, then I upgraded my bios and all problems was gone... (Asus K8V Deluxe)

krakrjak · n00b Joined: 08 Feb 2004 Posts: 20

No BIOS updates to try

and no Beta BIOSes either..... Nothing but the basics for now, but in a few months I have a built-in 120GB SATA upgrade. I'll give it periodic testing while 2.6 is ironing out and hopefully one of the kernel updates will just magically take care of it.

VanDan · Guru Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 586 Location: Australia

I haven't got a SATA drive up & running yet, but I've spent a LOT of time googling about Linux support for SATA, and I've read some *BAD* things about Segate SATA drives. Apparently they are full of design flaws that have numerous 'workarounds' that are needed in all drivers for SATA controllers, but I'm not sure if they have been implemented in the Linux kernel drivers. Maybe your problem is because you're using a Segate drive?

krakrjak · n00b Joined: 08 Feb 2004 Posts: 20

That could be it.... Hopefully the workarounds make it into the kernel sometime during the early 2.6 releases.

Corona688 · Veteran Joined: 10 Jan 2004 Posts: 1204

The gentoo LiveCD didn't detect my Silicon Image 3114 SATA controller, but fortunately I had an old 1GB drive handy. Installed onto the PATA drive and got things working, upgraded the kernel, and bam, the drive is found. Then I just partitioned the SATA drive, copied things over, setup grub on it, and changed the boot-order in the CMOS - I didn't even have to swap cables.

This was back in early January; I'd hope the LiveCDs have this included by now.