No SATA drive [sloved]

jimm · Posted: Fri Sep 09, 2005 5:04 pm Post subject: No SATA drive [sloved]

I have just completed a stage 1 install of gentoo to replace fedora 4 setup.
My hardware is:
Gigabyte ga-k8nf-9 with f7 bios
amd 64 +3200 Venice core 939 pin
1 GB ddr 400 (pc 3200)
1 40 GB ide (hda)
1 200 GB sata (usually sda)
1 dvd
1 dvd rw

during setup sda was always recognized. I setup 3 partitions, swap (sda1) var (sda2) and home (sda3). All could be mounted during the install. After setting up grub I rebooted and then had to play around a bit to get video to work. Finally (when I could read the boot messages) I rebooted into gentoo 2.6.12-r10 and only the ide drive is seen. Hdb (usually the dvd) got several no media found errors and finally timed out, then the boot sequence went straight into network discovery and never looked back for drives. Gentoo boots, but the ide drive is the only one that exists, I cant even find the sata with fdisk (looking for an sd* drive).
The drive exists in the bios and I did compile the kernel with sata and scsi support. All succesive reboots have given the same results. I even deleted /dev and let the system recreate it at boot. Any ideas would be appreciated, as I am not sure where to go from here.

gnat79 · Posted: Sun Sep 11, 2005 3:49 am Post subject:

Does the livecd still recognize the SATA disk?

I've got an SATA disk in my desktop that I use. I had a lot of problems getting the right stuff compiled into the kernel so that it would recognize it.

Also, where is your boot partition? Or, do you just have that on sda2? If you're booting the kernel, seems like the boot partition must be recognized.

And, my last idea, (maybe none of these will be helpful) is to check /etc/fstab to see that you have everything correctly typed in there.

I'm leaning towards the SATA stuff not correctly configured in the kernel, but you seem pretty sure it's all good. Here are a few things in my kernel, just in case you want to check.

My hard drive is a Seagate Barracuda 80GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150.

Device Drivers >>
ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support>>
<*> Silicon Image chipset support
SCSI device support>>
<*>SCSI disk support
<*>SCSI generic support
>>SCSI low-level drivers>>
[*]Serial ATA (SATA) support
<*> Silicon Image SATA support
<*> VIA SATA support <------ That was critical for my disk
<*> AHCI SATA support
<*> Intel PIIX/ICH SATA support
<M> Promise SATA SX4 support

There are a few others, most of which I'm sure I don't need. I planned on checking through to see which ones I could take out of my kernel, but I got lazy and started school, so I just left it all in. Looking back, I can see the last one is a module, so I'm pretty much positive I don't need that as it wouldn't help the booting at all.

Anyway, I hope some of that info may be helpful to you.
_________________
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those who can count in binary and those who can't.

doro1211 · Guru Joined: 06 Jun 2004 Posts: 312

If the livecd recognizes it, it's almost certainly a driver issue. I'd go back into my kernel config and add support for all the sata chipsets.

jimm · Posted: Mon Sep 12, 2005 5:32 pm Post subject: Thanks it was a driver issue

Thanks for your suggestions. BTW the boot sector was on hda1 so was seen at power up. what I did was turn on everything that had SATA in it (except ide sata which is deprecated) and low and behold the drive was recognized. Now I am backing items out one at a time to find what is necessary. Thanks again.

gnat79 · Posted: Mon Sep 12, 2005 8:53 pm Post subject:

Please add SOLVED to the subject line by editing the original message.
_________________
There are 11 kinds of people in the world:
those who can count in binary and those who can't.