[TriLUG] SATA/BIOS problem with Linux

OlsonE at aosa.army.mil OlsonE at aosa.army.mil
Tue Jul 20 09:00:00 EDT 2010


I'd check to make sure you have the latest BIOS for your motherboard. I had issues like this with my old Pentium 4/Dell system. It would boot one way but not the other (I believe I had to use PATA/"Compatible" until they (Dell) came out with an update... then it worked like a champ.

-----Original Message-----
From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org] On Behalf Of Joseph Mack NA3T
Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 2010 1:16 AM
To: trilug at trilug.org
Subject: [TriLUG] SATA/BIOS problem with Linux

My son's machine is an Asus mobo with a dual core CPU and SATA disk hardware (there is an IDE header but it's not used). The machine has a SATA hard disk and a SATA dvd. The BIOS has an "enhanced" and a "compatible" mode for SATA and it's set to "enhanced".

The machine is currently running winxp and I've had little success converting it to dual boot Linux. The following distros/live CDs all fail (usually freeze/hang) at some stage in booting or installing, all with some sort of disk
error: Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE (11 I think), Fedora 10. The linux based Kaspersky antivirus when detecting the disk(s) gets errors like

isw - device for volume "MyRAID5" broken /dev/sda wrong number of devices in RAID set

While the more commonly used distros hang on attempting to install, I can get Slackware to partition/boot/load/install just fine and Slackware can mount the winxp ntfs partition OK. However the liveCD version of Slackware (Slax) hangs in the boot process when detecting the disks, saying something like "this shouldn't happen".

If I move the disk to another SATA machine, and boot with a linux rescue CD, dmesg detects the partitions (winxp + slackware). However /dev only has a single entry for /dev/sda (but no sda1, sda2..sdaN). fdisk shows all the partitions, but I can't mount them (there being no corresponding /dev/sdaN). If I manually add /dev/sda1 with mknod, I get "no such device" on trying to mount /dev/sda1.

Even though I can't mount the partitions, I can dd copy the disk on the alternate machine and when the copy is moved back to the problem machine, the copy boots and runs fine.

The disk which has been initially setup on the "enhanced" 
SATA machine has partitions that don't look right to linux (it appears to look like an invalid RAID device). I would have thought that Linux would be OK with "enhanced" SATA. 
I'm assuming that I have to look at the disk with dmraid and blockid, but I've never used those tools and don't know what to look for or how to proceed. I assume I'll have to set the BIOS to "compatible" (I assume "enhanced" is causing the
problem) and then do something (what?) to the disk to make the partitions readable to Linux. Will I have to do something to make the disk readable to the "compatible" 
BIOS?

Thanks Joe
--
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!
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