Re: FC1 and SATA

[Greg Bailey <gbailey lxpro com>]

lewis jon att net wrote:

> I am trying to install Fedora Core 1 but it does not recognize my SATA drives. Does it support SATA? I may have an old distribution, I got it from PlanetCCRMA's (Stanford Universities low-latency audio kernal) site. Could this be my problem? I do want to try to stick with core 1 because it seems to be the most stable with CCRMA. If need be, I could use an old IDE drive for the OS, but will FC1 be able to use the SATAs once it is installed and happy on an IDE drive?
> Thanks,
> Jon
>
>  

I think the SATA drivers were added sometime around 2.4.27, so chances 
are the kernel that comes with Fedora 1 (or PlanetCCRMA for that matter) 
wouldn't have those drivers unless RedHat has backported them.  I 
recently ran into this problem in trying to modify RedHat 9 so that it 
could be installed on hardware with SATA drives.  It's doable, but a bit 
of work.

Basically, you'd have to modify and reproduce the following updated 
RPMS:  kernel (IMPORTANT: you'll need RedHat's 
linux-2.4.2-changeloop.patch to support anaconda), kernel-smp, 
kernel-BOOT (this is used by anaconda at installation time), mkinitrd 
(to fix some bug in order to include the SATA modules on the initrd 
image--may not be necessary for FC1), anaconda, anaconda-runtime (to 
include PCI information for the SATA hardware in order to recognize it), 
and hwdata (I just grabbed the one for RHEL3).

Then you'll need to use "buildinstall" from anaconda to rebuild the 
installation part of the CD image.  For RedHat 9, I used:

/usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/buildinstall \
   --comp dist-9 \
   --product "Red Hat Linux" \
   --version 9 \
   --release "Redhat 9 (Shrike)" \
   $BASEFSDIR

As for creating bootable media with updated RPMS, etc., there's already 
a fairly decent amount of information that exists for that part of the 
process.  Sorry if this is too much information or slightly off topic, 
but it took me a considerable amount of time to get SATA-compatible 
installable media and thought it might save someone time who's trying to 
do something similar...

Greg