Having given up, at least for now, on the onboard Promise RAID controller on my new mb, I switched the two Seagate SATA HDs onto the descrete SATA connectors on the MB. They're coming up, but with errors, or not at all in the stock gentoo kernel.
The stock gentoo kernel hangs on boot after the ICH5-SATA boot report. If I have ide=nodma in the boot invocation, the last line is hde: ST3120023AS, ATA DISK drive If I don't use ide=nodma, the hang is after the line blk: queue ....... I/O Limit 4095MB (mask 0xfff... etc.) If I use the smp kernel, I can mount the hard drive, partition it, and apparently write to it, but I get frequent console messages like: ide2: unexpected interrupt, status=0xd0, count=xxxxx If I use the smp-apci kernel (required to get Hyper-threading working) I seem to be able to mount existing partitions on the drives, but can't modify the partition tables. When I try to do so, I get, in addition to the "unexpected interrupt" error, the following errors, several times: hde: status error: status=0x58 (DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest) hde: drive not ready for command The partition table write fails. These are Seagate drives, and after buying them I disovered that Western Digital has a better reputation with some people for SATA drives, and that Seagate's may have known problems with DMA. Don't know if the drives are crap, the kernel doesn't contain the proper options, there's a timing issue, or what... I don't know if I can trust the SATA system for building a Gentoo install considering all this. -- Lindsay Haisley | "Everything works | PGP public key FMP Computer Services | if you let it" | available at 512-259-1190 | (The Roadie) | <http://www.fmp.com/pubkeys> http://www.fmp.com | | -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
