SATA Drive support

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: SATA Drive support
started by: Phasmagon

Posted by Phasmagon on Mar. 27 2006,10:13

I recently downloaded DSL 2.2.
After a while i found it quiet usefull so i desided to use it on an old pentium as an server (ftp, webserver, file server)

The problem I discovered was that I couldn't use my SATA Controller and Disk.

Looking around i found that the easiest way to solve my problem was to download DSL 2.1 and boot dsl sata. The problem is that the system hangs while probing for sata modules. Actually at sata_vsc.o. Can i somehow skip this module or load the nessesary modules after the system has loaded.

<---EDIT--->

Never mind the problem (an unset jumper) is solved.

The thing now is that after hdinstall the drive sda1 is lost, and cannot be mount. Any ideas?

Posted by cbagger01 on Mar. 28 2006,17:51

I don't think it is possible to do an hdinstall to an SATA drive because the SATA drivers are not compiled into the kernel and instead are loaded at boot time.

These files are stored in the minirt24.gz file, so if you do a frugal install or a poorman's install to an SATA drive it might work.

Posted by Phasmagon on Mar. 29 2006,07:18

I am not trying to do a hdinstall on a SATA drive.

Let me start over.

I have an old pentium 200Mhz, with a 10 Gb ATA drive.
I want to use it as a Web and FTP server.
As an addition to this I want to add a 120 Gb Western Digital hard drive as storage, throught a VIA SATA controller.

During CD boot the SATA drive is available.

What I want is to hdinstall DSL on the ATA drive and have the SATA drive available. I don't want to do a frugal install because I want to use mySQL and I want data saved automatically without the need to backup the system manually, every now and then mainly because of the possibility of power failure.

If I do a frugal install and add sata on the grub line, SATA works, but if I hdinstall it does not.

Any ideas?

p.s I don't mind doing a frugal install, but is it possible to automatically save data without ny input?

Posted by cbagger01 on Mar. 29 2006,17:51

The SATA drivers are stored inside the mnirt24.gz initial ramdisk.

If you do an hdinstall, you bypass the initial ramdisk and the drivers are never loaded.

The driver files are not stored in the normal location for a hd install, so you can't load the drivers manually even after the hdinstall is done with the bootup.

However, all it not lost. you can get the additional driver files from inside this tarball HERE:

< http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub.....tar.gz >

Then all you need to do is to modprobe the right driver name and you are good to go.

In fact, you can even take advantage of the KNOPPIX hard drive and partition autodetection routine if you modprobe or insmod the driver early in the INIT process, before the /etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig script runs.

I suppose the easiest thing to do is add something like:

modprobe sata_nv (or whatever the driver module is needed for your controller)

to the first line of your knoppix-autoconfig file.

Posted by Phasmagon on Mar. 30 2006,10:16

Thanks a million...
Worked like a charm.
P.S. Actually the only thing I needed to do after copying the modules was depmod.

Posted by maxp_owers on April 04 2006,20:40

Hello, linux newbie, even more so with DSL (day 2)...

I'm running off a 128 usb stick, and i want to access the various files on my SATA H/D. I'd like to be able to see both of it's partitions. Windows is on the first 15GB partition, and misc files on the other.

i know it's something like:

mount /dev/scd0 /mnt/scd0 (but i could use some clarification on that...)

but it says i'm not allowed to do it... when i type su it asks for a p/w

Anyone know what the default super user password is ??