issues with SATA hard drives

[Guy Fraser]

On Fri, 2004-24-12 at 18:23 +0000, Geoffrey Leach wrote:
> On 12.24 09:13, rramineni wrote:
> > I am trying to install FC 3 on a dell dimension 8400
> > PC. The mother board comes with 4 port SATA interface.
> > There are two hard drives currently installed, one
> > with win XP and the other one is for installing linux.
> > When I boot up with windows, both the drives seem to
> > be working fine.
> > 
> > Seems that the linux installation will not recognize
> > both of the drives.
> > 
> > The SATA controller is Intel 82801FR SATA AHCI
> > Controller
> > 
> > Has any one had similar issues before? Any help will
> > be greatly appreciated
> 
> Short answer. I have a dual-SATA MB with XP and FC3 sharing one drive  
> and and EXT3 file system on the other.  Both work fine.  Controller is  
> Promise, so its not a perfect answer.
> 
> Long answer.  You need to provide more complete information. You  
> presumably have XP on the first drive.  You've installed  
> "linux" (hopefully FC2 or FC3, or you're on the wrong list) on drive 1,  
> yes?  And FC boots properly?  What does the boot menu (aka the Grub  
> menu) show you?  When you say that, "the linux installation will not  
> recognize both of the drives," presumably you mean that it won't  
> recognize drive 0, because if its running it must have found the drive  
> its installed on.  What does /etc/fstab say about the XP drive?  
> Anything?  If you have XP in an NTFS file system, there should be  
> something like:
> 	/dev/sda1               /dosc                   ntfs     
> noauto,defaults 0 0
> 
> where /dev/sda1 assumes that XP is on partition 0 of the first drive  
> and /dosc is a directory that you create.  You'll also need to load the  
> ntfs kernel module.  However, as the ntfs module does not support  
> writing to the files on the FS, this may be a waste of time for you.
> 
I have a Promise SATA-150 working fine at home. I also tested the
Promise SATA Raid on a ASUS P4PE motherboard, and it works too.

I ran into problems while installing. It turns out that if you 
have a mix SATA and standard ATA drives you need to go into 
advanced when setting up your boot loader, and reorder the 
drives so that the SATA drive(s) are at the top if you want to 
boot from them.

I have no experience with the Intel chipset the original poster 
uses, but we have some new DELL rack mount servers at work 
and the SATA RAID works well on them.