[NTLUG:Discuss] FC3 on Serial ATA Hard Drive?

[Chris Cox]

John K. Taber wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-04-12 at 17:40 -0500, Jack Snodgrass wrote:
> 
...stuff about sata removed....

My thoughts.

Need more info.  We need to know exactly what kind/chip
SATA is being dealt with.  Many come with stinky
FRAID support which may or may not work.  Seems like lately
it has been "may not".  If it is "RAID", try treating
the drive as non-RAID.  Also in your BIOS there may
be a setting (not sure what it will be called) that
will allow your SATA drive to appear to be PATA.  That
also helps people get over the hump with regards to SATA.

SATA is in a high state of flux and has been radically
changed since 2.6.8... I'm running 2.6.11.4 so as to
have SATA with mixed mode devices including a CD/DVD
connected to it.  In the past, the CD/DVD stuff was
blacklisted... so you ended up with the PIO-mode
only ide-generic module for access (which is what I used
to do the initial install.. just not pleasant afterwards
since you really need DMA to those devices).

My laptop has a SATA chip but the hd and CD are PATA
(connected to the SATA controller... since the connector
is the same on a laptop).  For me, I (Intel archs) have
to load the ata_piix module (you can have initrd do this)
to ensure that my drives both show up as SCSI-like
devices (/dev/sda and /dev/sr0).

Folks with earlier versions of 2.6... things were done
quite a bit differently... so you may have /dev/hda, etc...

SATA on Linux = Work in progress

mkinitrd is a way to boot a mini-kernel to load drivers
needed to make the system go.  It takes as parameters
the kernel, the initrd to create and the modules to
build into the initrd. (those are the basics).

Let's see how far you can get trying some of the
suggestions I made above... and see if you can
post more info about you're actual device(s) if possible.