Promise SATA 150 Card - Enable IDE?

[imacamper]

I am an extreme Linux newbie, although I've been running FreeBSD for a few years. I've installed Fedora Core 3 on a a SCSI drive attached to an Advansys controller. I also have whatever standard Promise 150 SATA controller card that was boxed with a Maxtor 160 gb drive installed in one of the available PCI slots. The card has two SATA interfaces and one IDE interface. My motherboard has the normal primary and secondary IDE interfaces. Because the motherboard interfaces are UDMA 66 and the Promise card is UDMA 100, I want to use the Promise interface with this IDE drive. I also have a CD drive as master on the primary motherboard port. The CD drive is detected and the Promise card is detected. However only the SATA interfaces are seen on the Promise card. The IDE is not and thus, I can't access my drive.

Is there anyway to use this card with the IDE drive? I'd appreciate any advice you might have.

Thanks,

Drew

[VStrider]

have you used this IDE controller before? if you have and you know it's working,

you could update your kernel, and check on the promise website for latest drivers or firmware. also have a look on your promise card BIOS and/or jumper settings, for any option that enables the IDE controller, just in case it's off.

[imacamper]

Originally Posted by VStrider

have you used this IDE controller before? if you have and you know it's working, you could update your kernel, and check on the promise website for latest drivers or firmware. also have a look on your promise card BIOS and/or jumper settings, for any option that enables the IDE controller, just in case it's off.

Yes, I know the card works. The SATA portion of the card is detected, just not the IDE or PATA portion. Other Google searching suggests the 'sata_promise' driver only supports the SATA portion with the default kernels. Seems I need to use 'libata' to patch the drivers/scsi portion of the source (which I've done) code and then recompile. I haven't found a real clear guide on how to do that in the Linux world but I'm very comfortable doing it in the FreeBSD world. Do I have to recompile the whole kernel or is there some way to just make a new sata_promise.ko module? Any suggestions for a newbie guide?

Thanks,

Drew

[x_terminat_or_3]

Maybe this might be related. I have FC3 installed with the official kernel rpms and it did not support SATA drives at all. So I downloaded the kernel source and configured & compiled the kernel to use the SATA drive ( & the RAID controller).

So if your IDE passes trough a SATA card, then maybe your kernel needs to support SATA first.

To debug your harddrive, try to swap it with the CDROM drive to verify that it works.

[imacamper]

Originally Posted by x_terminat_or_3

Maybe this might be related. I have FC3 installed with the official kernel rpms and it did not support SATA drives at all. So I downloaded the kernel source and configured & compiled the kernel to use the SATA drive ( & the RAID controller).

So if your IDE passes trough a SATA card, then maybe your kernel needs to support SATA first.

To debug your harddrive, try to swap it with the CDROM drive to verify that it works.

The kernel does support the SATA part via the 'sata_promise' kernel module. Please see my above post.

Any suggestions for a newbie guide on configuring and recompiling the kernel and/or modules? I've actually tried running 'make' or 'make modules' from the /usr/src/... directory but the builds fail. I really would like to just rebuild the sata_promise module and give it a go. Can I do that? I've tried 'make drivers/scsi' but it says there's nothing to be done. I'm sure I'm missing something.

Thanks,

Drew

[imacamper]

Never found a way to make just the module. Seems modules are very closely tied with the kernel and as such, everything must be compiled together. I followed the instructions at http://www.digitalhermit.com/linux/K...ild-HOWTO.html. However at this part (http://www.digitalhermit.com/linux/K....html#MKINITRD), I got an error about "no deps" or something like that. I was able to complete this step with:

/sbin/new-kernel-pkg --mkinitrd --depmod --install <kernel, i.e. 2.6.11-14_FC>

Then I followed the rest of the directions and the new kernel saw the PATA port on my Promise 150.

[x_terminat_or_3]

Well I agree it can be a pain. After more then ten successfull Kernel Builds, I still have doubts...


What I usually do is make xconfig, set the options, then make rpm After that I just distribute it to my different servers and install it with rpm.

Sometimes it fails and I need to make all before make rpm.


Do a make help for a list of targets.