[mythtv-users] Legacy drives and new motherboards

[Yan Seiner]

I just waged an epic battle to get a new mobo with 6GBps SATA ports to 
recognize my legacy 3GBps hard drives.

I am going to guess that many of us have a basket full of old slow hard 
drives that just keep chugging away so this is probably not unique.

For posterity:

edit /etc/default/grub and find the line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

Change it to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="libata.force=3:3.0G,4:3.0G,5:3.0G,6:3.0G"

where the port numbers correspond to the ataX numbers in dmesg output.  
Set those ports to 3.0G to work with older hard drives.

My Asus Z87 mobo bios doesn't recognize those drives at all but they 
show up as soon as the kernel slows the ports down.

Make sure you run update-grub after you make the changes.