[mythtv-users] RH9 with SATA drive

[Wouter Lagerweij]

On Tue, 2004-01-20 at 15:15, schepens at shaw.ca wrote:
> I'm setting up a new SATA hard drive in preparation for installing MythTV, and I'm wondering whether anybody's accomplished this before!  The drive is a Seagate, and the motherboard uses Promise FastTrak 376 chip.  
> 
> When I boot with the Red Hat 9 CD 1, it says I have no installable media (i.e. it can't find a hard drive).  I tried building the block storage driver floppy but using this doesn't get me any further.  Do I need kernel modules in order for this to work or is it just a BIOS configuration / setup thing?  Or can a SATA drive even be used as a primary disk?

I have a mainboard with a promise SATA chipset on it, and have had some
problems.
First, if this is a new drive, you should go into the SATA bios at
startup, and create a RAID. In my case, just letting the BIOS
autoconfigure was fine. 

I haven't used RedHat in a long while, but I recently installed on the
SATA drive using a Mandrake cooker snapshot.
The mandrake installer correctly identified and loaded a module for the
promise chipset, and could install onto it. I did get into trouble later
on, because the installer used a 2.4 kernel, while installing a 2.6
kernel. This caused some confusion, since the modules for SATA chips are
named differently in the 2.6 kernel, resulting in a failure to create a
correct initrd.img. After manually creating that image all was fine...

As far as RH is concerned: I don't think 9.0 comes with the right
driver, so you'll need to either compile it yourself, get it precompiled
(see link below), or get a newer redhat/fedora/whatever.
You could take a look at:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/archive/18/2003/09/2/60248 for
some discussion on this subject.

Wouter
-- 
Wouter Lagerweij <wouter at lagerweij.com>