SATA detection

[Tony Alfrey]

Vu Pham wrote:
<snip>
>>
> 
> POST is Power On Selft Test, it is the period since you power on the PC
> until it starts reading the boot record of your drive.

The SATA controller *is* recognized when the PCI buss devices are 
scanned during POST.  It lists it's interrupts, slot and so on.
During POST, the controller brand name is announced on a separate screen 
as INITIO INIC1620 SATA controller and the SATA drives are identified 
and their size is displayed.

The system, of course, tries to boot from whatever boot device is 
selected.  If one selects HD-0, HD-1, etc.  it tries to find IDE hard 
drives and fails because there are none.  If CDROM is selected for the 
boot device it will boot from CDROM *if* the IDE1 on-board controller is 
enabled, because CDROM is an IDE device.

The hard drives are on the SATA controller.  The bios has no option for 
SATA controller for a boot device, but it has an option for SCSI.  The 
hard drives are not found if SCSI is selected as the boot source.  Under 
no conditions are the hard disks activated.

Research so far says that SIIG (Silicon Image) made cards with chipsets 
for which there are device drivers.  But when *this* card is announced 
during POST, the chip name is different than the one for which there are 
drivers available.  A Google search shows no drivers for the INITIO 
INIC1620 chip; others have had this problem.

SATA controllers require installing a driver or having the driver built 
in to the kernel.  The more recent distros may have these drivers;  but 
even my SuSE 9.1 disk has these drivers on the CD if you do a manual 
installation; it gives a big long list of drivers for SCSI and SATA 
controller chips, but I do not see this exact chip.

I tried to load FC-6, but it does not appear that additional drivers are 
on the disk, at least I cannot get to them during the install.  There is 
an option to install a driver from a disk, and I tell FC-6 that the 
driver is on the FC-6 disk (it is /dev/hdc since it is the IDE CDROM on 
the IDE Secondary Master)  but it does not know where to find it.

Promise makes a SATA card for which they provide RedHat drivers. 
However, the driver is source, and I need the linux box with kernel 2.6 
to build the driver.  Which I don't have until I can get the drives to work.



-- 
Tony Alfrey
tonyalfrey at earthlink.net
"I'd Rather Be Sailing"