[mythtv-users] Re: Serial ATA and Gentoo

Steven Bennett sablists at earthlink.net
Fri Oct 10 12:22:01 EDT 2003


Scott Seaman wrote:
>  Has anyone gotten Gentoo to recognize Serial ATA hard drives?  I've
> browsed the archives and seen a few posts referring to Serial ATA drives,
> but I can't find out if anyone has gotten them to work.
> 
>  If someone out there has gotten it to work, could you tell me how you
> accomplished it?  I'm getting antsy to get my MythTV box up and going, and
> this problem is bumming me out (should have stuck with IDE!)  Thanks!

I don't use Gentoo, but if it has the 2.4.22 release kernel, you should have
*some* Serial ATA support, depending on the chipset you're using.  I've
heard the Silicon Image chipset works fairly well with this.

However, if you're using the Intel ICH5 on-chip SATA support, you may be in
the same boat I was in with my Abit IS7 board -- while the 2.4.22 kernel has
support for this, it's highly unstable, to the point where it's likely to
crash the system on any significant disk access.  (Such was my
experience...)

The -ac patch tree has an alternative to the normal SATA support - a new
driver set called libata, which basically moves SATA support (and your IDE
and ATA drives) into the SCSI realm.  To use it, you need to apply the
latest ac patch to the standard 2.4.22 kernel, turn off the usual IDE
support, and enable the new stuff instead.  But I was unable to get this to
boot for me with Mandrake 9.2rc2 -- you may have better luck with Gentoo.

Alternatively, you could try the 2.6.0 test kernel.

Me, after two months of trying all kinds of stuff to get SATA working, I
broke down and bought an IDE drive, and am mostly up and running now.  I
wish I had done it sooner...

-->Steve Bennett



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