P5Q Pro mobo - cannot find sata drive

[rfslls]

THE ISSUE:

Somehow Fedora 12 does not find one of my Sata drives (Seagate Barracuda 500GB) on the motherboard (Asus P5Q pro).

The drive is attached to SATA_E1, which is a Silicon Image Serial ATA RAID connector. The drive currently has Windows Vista 64-bit OS which has been working fine.

Fedora install loads correctly without errors, but only shows my RAID system on SATA ports 1-6.


WHAT I HAVE TRIED:

I have tried showing RAID as IDE in the BIOS, and setting it to compatible mode. Still does not detect.

I have tried setting the drives to ACPI mode in BIOS. No effect.


OTHER INFO:

I'm installing the x86_64 version of Fedora 12.

I have run the Debian i686 installer and it picks up this volume without issue.

[JEO]

Perhaps the same problem as in post #6 of this thread?

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=242391

[rfslls]

Ace, JEO!

Not sure how that unwanted metadata got there. Will it negatively affect my drive if I erase it?

Note this is a system drive.

[JEO]

Most metadata is very close to the end of the disk and is only a few sectors in length. I have never had a problem erasing it using the dmraid command on a drive with a filesystem.

[rfslls]

Thank you.

I have run dmraid -E -r /dev/sdd (this was the device that wasn't being detected) and it now shows up in the installer as a storage device.

I am able to configure the partitions, but then the installer exits saying 'extended partitions cannot be hidden msdos labels'. This asks if I want to file a bug report, or exit.

My /dev/sdd has the following partitions/allocations:

/dev/sdd1 = Vista OS (300GB)
2 = free space (50GB)
3 = NTFS (20GB)
4 = free space (30GB)

Both using all the free space above, and using only the 1st free space allocation give me the above error.

I have checked in windows, and the free spaces above are genuine free spaces - no partitions, msdos or otherwise.

I know this is outside the scope of the original query, but any help appreciated :-)

[JEO]

That error looks like a bug in the anaconda installer. See:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=567118

[rfslls]

Right...firewalled by Fedora again!

Thanks for your help though. Might get meself a separate physical disk then.