ahci driver fails on lightscribe dvd drive on ati sb600 controller

[ibisis]

i've installed fc6 on a compaq dc5750 desktop (athlon 64 X2 4600) with an ati radeon xpress 1150 motherboard which has an ati sb600 sata controller with a hard drive, a lightscribe dvd drive, and a 2nd hard drive.

the latest bios (786E3 v1.54a) permits a choice for SATA emulation of 1) legacy IDE, 2) native IDE, and 3) raid. Apparently the sb600 also offers a AHCI mode, but doesn't seem that the bios allows it to be specified.
Currently I'm using 2) native IDE.

The problem is that the ahci driver tries but fails to setup the dvd drive.
ata2: port is slow to respond, please be patient
ata2: port failed to respond (30 secs)
ata2: softreset failed (device not ready)
ata2: softreset failed, retrying in 5 secs
ata2: port is slow to respond, please be patient
ata2: port failed to respond (30 secs)
ata2: COMRESET failed (device not ready)
ata2: hardreset failed, retrying in 5 secs
ata2: port is slow to respond, please be patient
ata2: port failed to respond (30 secs)
ata2: COMRESET failed (device not ready)
ata2: reset failed, giving up
The hard drives are configured without any problem.

Is this a ahci driver issue or a dvd drive issue, or am I just missing something?
any suggestions what to try?

I was able to install fc4 from dvd on the delivered machine (earlier bios with sata emulation hardwired to legacy ide). While the computer does boot the fc6 dvd, after the language and keyboard questions, the ahci driver doesn't find the CD drive and the install ends there. To install fc6, I copied the fc6 dvd to a directory on another node and used an option to install via ftp.

Also noted that the "drive busy" light stays on all the time.

thanks.

[JohnGnu]

I had a similar problem with my dc5750 and Fedora Core 6. I solved it by buying a Rosewill RC-210 2-port SATA card (one internal, one external), and plugging the Lightscribe DVD drive into that. Worked fine after that. The hard drives are still plugged into the mainboard. The RC-210 cost about $25 and saved me hours or days of hassle. I've used the Lightscribe to burn both CDs and DVD-R's under FC6 in this setup. I don't know how to make it print pretty pictures on DVDs though ;-).

PS: I also tried a Rosewill RC-209, 4-port SATA card, but that did NOT work for me on dc5750 with FC6. YMMV.

John

[ibisis]

I haven't worked on this in a while. I decided to give it another go before trying a different SATA controller as suggested. I updated my installation of fedora core with the latest updates (Linux 2.6.20-1.2962.fc6).

Now the dvd drive is recognized and is working. I've played a movie DVD using Xine and a music CD using the GNOME cd player.