[oclug] SATA Hard Drives

[Doug Wilger]

On this machine, I've got an ASUS A7V600 MB with onboard VIA SATA
controller, and 200 Gb SATA drive.  I'm running Fedora Core 3 right
now.  I've done some testing of distros with the following results:

gentoo with the 2.6 kernel worked well.  Had some problems with
emerging things, but they turned out to be RAM related.
Fedora Core 2 - initial install was fine, however, everything died
after a kernel upgrade.  This is because they changed the SATA
interface in the kernel from setting up IDE devices to SCSI devices,
which meant that my system wanted to talk to /dev/hde, but the kernel
now set up the drive as /dev/sda
Fedora Core 3 (Test 3, then upgraded to final).  No issues so far -
drive was recognized during the install, as was my USB external drive
that I use for backups.




On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 09:08:11 -0500, Milan Budimirovic
<milan.budimirovic at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> Dave Edwards wrote:
> 
> >I'd like to hear any experiences, good or bad, with SATA hard drives.
> >As far as I can tell, SATA support in the Linux kernel is solid, and
> >there are drivers to support a fairly broad range of drives; but
> >having them recognized during installs is dodgier and can demand some
> >involved Linux gymnastics to get working properly.  What have you
> >found?
> >
> >Dave.
> >
> >
> The install problems have nothing to do with the drives themselves but
> with the controllers. It's just that some of these controllers are new
> to the market and are not very well supported in the 2.4.x kernels.
> 
> Then again, it's sauce for the goose. Try installing Windows XPletive on
> a SATA drive. You have to hit F3 or something at the precise moment
> during initial bootup, then insert the driver disks. And XPletive will
> not install in just any partition either. You need a separate FAT
> partition for the NT boot loader, plus the bootloader has trouble
> accessing drives on some third part controllers.
> --
> OCLUG general discussion list
> OCLUG at lists.oclug.on.ca
> http://www.oclug.on.ca/mailman/listinfo/oclug
>