Can't fdisk SATA drive

goulartca · Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2004 4:33 am Post subject: Can't fdisk SATA drive

I got the AMD64 LiveCD and attempted a clean install on a machine with the Gigabyte K8VT800 (via K8T800 chipset) with a Western Digital 80Gb SATA drive connected to SATA0.

The kernel loads with no problems and both SATA modules (via and lib) are being loaded. When I run "fdisk /dev/sda" (sda is the name used by Suse 9 to refer to it) I get the "Unable to open..." msg. If I try hda I get the same message.

Is Gentoo not detecting my disk or is it using a different device name?

Thanks in advance for any help.

goulartca · Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2004 5:09 am Post subject:

Never mind the previous message. Gentoo is finding my SATA drive and referring to it as "hde". It's too late to finish the install now so I'm going to call it a night.

Is there a reason why Suse sees SATA disks as SCSI and Gentoo sees them as IDE? Aside from how the different distributions see SATA does this make any difference in how it performs?

chebe · Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2004 10:28 am Post subject:

I guess it depends on the chipset ... a SiI 3512A gives the SATA drives as sdc and sdd (during the install with the live CD) and sda sdb when using "my" kernel

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scoobydu · Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2004 10:39 am Post subject:

Are you using the 3112A driver by any chance?

It may be a differant problem, but I have both the SIL0680 (IDE) and 3112A (SATA).

If I load the SIL 0680 driver in the ide section in the kernel, it also takes control of my 3112A as well. In the kernel description it does say the driver is for both, but this makes my sata drives show up as /dev/hde & /dev/hdg.

This happens even if I have sata enabled in the scsi section of the kernel.

If I remove the SIL0680 driver from the kernel, then the scsi 3112A driver picks up the drives and puts them under /dev/sda & /dev/sdb, as they should be.

The only solution I've found is to remove the SIL0680.

Alternatively, if you have other scsi devices (sdcard readers as well), then your drives may turn up at /dev/sdc & sdd (If the drives have previously been formated, then you should see /dev/sdx1 etc for each of the partitions)
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goulartca · Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2004 2:47 am Post subject:

Gelfling · Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2004 4:30 am Post subject:

K8T800 motherboards use VIA VT8237 SATA chipsets, some mb makers include the Promise SATA chipsets for SATA 3 & 4 connections. I am in the same boat in that I am unable to install to my 80GB SATA hd which is connected to the Via VT8237 SATA1 connector. I see that the drives are detected as /dev/hde & /dev/hdg with pio support. I will only install if I can be sure I can operate the drive with full DMA support.
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roarkh · Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2004 5:58 am Post subject:

That is interesting. I seem to have very similar hardware to yours, a MSI K8T Neo FI2SR motherboard with a seagate 120gb and also a 160gb SATA hard drive attached to the via controller. These drives are being detected as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, there were detected that way when booting off of the CD as well, I wonder if something has changed with the new install CD??? Full DMA support is definitely working, hdparm -t /dev/sda3 is returning 55.45mb/sec disk reads.

Gelfling · Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2004 7:29 am Post subject:

I only booted the Gentoo 2004.0 Athlon64 version LiveCD and I also downloaded the Athlon64 packages iso cause I planned on doing a stage3 install. Which version did you install?
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Phanbox64: MSI K8N Neo2, AMD Athlon64 3500+, ATI Radeon 9800XT, Corsair TwinX1024-3200C2 1024MB SDRAM, 2 WD 74GB Raptors & 120GB SATA HD, Audigy2 ZS, Plextor PX-708A DVD-/+RW, Pioneer DVD-106S DVD-ROM, CoolerMaster WaveMaster Case

jsc1959 · Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2004 11:46 am Post subject:

I have the same chipset on my msi mobo...sata drive recognized as hdg and it works fine..here is a hdparm -tT for ya to boot

jeffsmachine # hdparm -tT /dev/hdg

/dev/hdg:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 2840 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1420.22 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 164 MB in 3.00 seconds = 54.66 MB/sec

and

jeffsmachine # hdparm /dev/hdg

/dev/hdg:
multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 1 (32-bit)
unmaskirq = 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 16383/255/63, sectors = 72303840, start = 0
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Gelfling · Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2004 4:57 pm Post subject:

Okay, I thought that because I didn't see DMA on /dev/hde & /dev/hdg in dmesg after booting my livecd that it wasn't available, thanks for the info.
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Phanbox64: MSI K8N Neo2, AMD Athlon64 3500+, ATI Radeon 9800XT, Corsair TwinX1024-3200C2 1024MB SDRAM, 2 WD 74GB Raptors & 120GB SATA HD, Audigy2 ZS, Plextor PX-708A DVD-/+RW, Pioneer DVD-106S DVD-ROM, CoolerMaster WaveMaster Case

dkaplowitz · Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2004 2:52 am Post subject: