Debian

Hi,

I have got myself a new hard disk- a 80 GB SATA IDE from Seagate. When I try installing Red Hat Linux 9(and RHL 7.2 too), it displays an error message saying that it fails to detect any hard drive. In the BIOS, I tried changing the drive configuration to "Legacy Drive", but that didnt help either. What am I missing here? Is any other flavor of UNIX advised?

on the assumption that you put in a new 80gb drive into an existing pc ...

are the correct cables attached and tight? if yes, are you using the original ribbon cable that came with the box or the ribbon cable that came with the drive? sometimes you need to test the cables to make sure your drive works ...

if you're sure that the cables are correct and are tight, try installing dos and see if it sees the drive ... i doubt that it will because the install programs look at the hardware from the bios perspective before it continues ... this way you can test if your drive is okay from a windows perspective ...

if the older drive still exists and still bootable, try replacing that back in the box and booting up ... if the box boots up without issues, your 80gb drive might actually be bad ...

You may need to recompile your kernel to include SATA support. I'm running on Debian with a self-compiled kernel and SATA support enabled. It works great.

Recent 2.4.x kernels have SATA modules included (but not compiled by default). They may not be available in your RH9 stock kernel. If recompiling the kernel is not comfortable to you, then reinstall your system. Maybe, upgrade to Fedora Core 2 or 3. They should have SATA support compiled builtin the kernel (I think). Even if that doesn't, the kernel version is recent enough that recompiling it will give you a higher chance to succeed.

To the best of my knowledge, the "legacy" mode in the BIOS only matters for drive numbering related issues with OSes like DOS. Still, the OS needs to recognize the drive to use it (Windows 2000 didn't support SATA drives at all so I was forced to upgrade to Wind Blows XP :-( )

To Just Ice:

Thanks for your help! But I think I should have been more specific. I have already Windows running on my PC so I guess, the hardware as such isnt a problem.

To chkibong:
How do i recompile a kernel without installing Linux? I am planning to shift to Fedora 4, du think that recognises SATA inherently?

Thanks for the prompt replies!

Hi,
But In my experience with SATA, No linux has Boot-time Support for SATA. You have To Install another HDD(IDE) and Install linux, and compile the Kernel with SATA Support, To get this SATA drive to work.

Another Geeky method is,
1.Compile kernel in another Linux m/c, with the support for Your SATA drive
2. Mount Your Install ISO to that existing Linux m/c as a loopback device.
3. Change the default kernel with the Newly compiled kernel.
4. Burn the ISO and Install linux.

What you gonna do now ?

Hi,

Well I tried with Fedora Core 4, because someone told me that it has boot time support for SATA drives. It hasnt, and I get the same problem as before--the installation simply stops in the middle. Now regarding having the kernel recompiled on another machine, since I dont have access to another machine with Linux on it (at least not ready/easy access),I was thinking whether this approach would work (and if it does, can somebody explain how): I installed VMWare(virtual OS software) on my XP OS giving it the target drive as another partition. I could install RHL 9, without a single hitch on VMWare. Can I recompile the kernel here, write it down on a CD somewhere, and try reinstalling Linux (RHL 9)? Or, better still, RHL 9, during boot time, asks for the relevant HDD driver if it doesnt find any, so perhaps I could copy the respective driver from the VMWare's implementation of the virtual RHL 9, and use it during the installation. Which of these approaches would work (if any would), and can someone detail out how.

Nobody told me SATA would be such a PAIN!!!!