ICH5 raid controller managed non-raid SATA drives.

[aphyr]

Motherboard: Abit AI7
Raid Controller: ICH5R
Disk configuration: 4 regular IDE PATA drives on IDE1 and IDE2
2 200gb seagate drives managed by raid controller.

I recently bought a pair of 200GB seagate drives for addition to my system, but had some difficulty setting them up. Under normal circumstances, the BIOS prioritized the SATA drives and took over my normal IDE channels, preventing me from using my PATA drives. I tried using 'enhanced' mode, except that that apparently limits the addressable space on each drive to 137GB, notably smaller than the 200 actually available. Eventually I settled on the solution of setting the SATA ports to be managed by the onboard ICH5R chip, normally used for RAID. Due to various dual-booting issues, using the drives in a RAID array is not exactly useful. Instead, I left the drives separate, but let the raid controller handle them. This made windows happy with a pair of visible 200gb disks.

Next step: Gentoo. I've already set up a number of gentoo systems, and the 2004.2 LiveCD auto-detected the SATA drives just fine. I performed the install to one of the 200GB's, set up kernel 2.6.7 to use SCSI_PIIX support, and rebooted. Unfortunately, the system refused to recognize the SATA drives which contained the root FS (an obvious problem). I recovered using the LiveCD, messed with a number of options, and tried again. And again. I've switched between standard ATA support and the scsi drivers, under the theory that they might be conflicting over the same device. I tried 2.4.26, in the theory that perhaps the older drivers would work. Eventually I broke down and attempted genkernel. That also failed.

Eventually discovered config.gz in the /proc of the working liveCD environement, copied that to my current config, compiled everything possibly useful *into* the kernel following lsmod (the relevant modules seemed to be ATA_PIIX and LIB_ATA), as modules residing on an unaccessable filesystem are difficult to utilize, and failed again.

My suspicion is that somewhere in the 20-odd kernels I've made in the last week I missed some critical undocumented option that would make this all work. The fact that the liveCD works perfectly obviously gives cause for hope. Does anyone have advice for this situation, or more practically, a working .config snippet I can learn from?

Thanks in advance,
Aphyr

[jonnii]

finally, a post i can help someone with!

actually, what you need to do is fart around in the bios! I'm not sure exactly how it works with teh AI7, but with my IC7 i needed to ENABLE sata-raid so that the drives were going through there, but i never actually set them as a stripe/mirror in the boot utility.

This should expose the drives to the driver (which should be 2.6 if you want sata to work.. i think).

Hope that helps!

[aphyr]

Actually, my drives were already set up this way. Could I have a copy of your config?

[aphyr]

Still struggling here, although now I'm on 2.6.8. Any suggestions?

[y0zza]

[aphyr]

Aha! This is actually listed as a bug in the bios changelog!

[hanj]

Hello aphyr

I'm now fighting the exact same problem.. I have dual 200g seagate SATA drives.. booting from LiveCD.. and install went fine.. booting off harddisk fails. It will hang on "Verifying DMI Pool....". I noticed your last entry stating the bug in last changelog for BIOS. I'm assuming that this is version 17. My AI7 already had the 17 BIOS (w/ fix for SATA). I upgraded my BIOS to the latest ( 18 ) just in case that was the problem.. but I can still NOT boot from harddisk.

I even downgraded everything... pulling one of the drives out, eliminating RAID.. just trying to get it to boot off of disk.. and still no luck. I made sure I built those same drivers *into* the kernel as you did... .nothing.

Any ideas on how I can get past this??
Thanks!
hanji