Enable Silicon Image SATA Controller

[CNLiberal]

I was curious as to what problems I might see if I enable the SI SATA1 controller on my ASUS A7N8X-Dlx board AFTER I have FC4 installed? Kudzu is still enabled. Shouldn't it just detect and install drivers without my intervention? Or am I just to used to Windoze? What do I need to do to get this controller working? I have a 160GB SATA drive I'd like to put on the system. At first, I'd like to just leave data on there and see if it holds, if it does, i'd like to add it to my LVM group. The drive is supposedly "bad". It was in a RAID5 array and one of the drives went out. I think that the SATA cord just came loose. Either way, what headaches am I in store for? Thanks all!

-Lib

[Seve]

Hello:
What does the output of:
$ dmesg | grep -i sata
tell you, if anything?
Is the SI controller listed?

Seve

[CNLiberal]

dmesg | grep -i sata
sata_sil version 0.9
ata1: SATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0xF0924080 ctl 0xF092408A bmdma 0xF0924000 irq 11
ata2: SATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0xF09240C0 ctl 0xF09240CA bmdma 0xF0924008 irq 11
ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113)
scsi0 : sata_sil
ata2: SATA link down (SStatus 0)
scsi1 : sata_sil


Also, there is a \dev\sda listed. I know this sounds DUMB, but I need to format that drive. I need to know how to partition as well. It would be great if I could do this graphically. I'd like to make the partition a JFS partition. I know it's very n00b, but any help would...well help. Thanks!

--Lib

[CNLiberal]

Well, i RTFM'd and I figured it out. I ran fdisk and created the partition, then I ran jfs_mkfs -c /dev/sda1 and it's running now. How long should it take to do this? It's been running for 5 minutes and it's still have 0%. Any thoughts? Could this drive be bad? Also, is there a graphical tool out there for creating/viewing partitions and formatting the drive? Thanks!

[Seve]

Hello:
There is GParted
$ yum info gparted
Summary: Gnome Partition Editor

Description:
GParted stands for Gnome Partition Editor and is a graphical frontend to
libparted. Among other features it supports creating, resizing, moving
and copying of partitions. Also several (optional) filesystem tools provide
support for filesystems not included in libparted. These optional packages
will be detected at runtime and don't require a rebuild of GParted
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/features.php
Seve

[CNLiberal]

OK, so the drive FINALLY finished formatting. I guess the reason it took so long was because it was checking for bad blocks.

jfs_mkfs -c /dev/sda1

I'm currently copying over 100GBs to this drive. I am keeping the originals in case the drive does go kaput. But it seems to be transferring fine. I installed gparted and that's pretty sweet. Are there any graphical tools that will also format a drive for me? I'm trying to apply what I know from a Windoze environment to a Linux env, and it's difficult! Thanks for all the help!