Hello Federico.
I have tried so many things to solve this problem, but never got exactly what I wanted -- a clean install an a single SATA drive.
Some people suggested that I alter the RH installation CDs to include a modified kernel. I thought about it, but that would have require compiling a kernel that is at least 2.4.21 (SATA support starts around that area), patch to support the VIA SATA (see this posting: http://www.spinics.net/lists/kernel/msg202339.html -- usually this means manually patching both generic.c & generic.h since the files have been modified since), replace the kernel the installation will install *and* the kernel that is used to boot the installation itself (so the installation program will recognize the SATA drive and install into it). Don't know about you, for me that was shooting too high :)
So, what I decided to do was to fetch a regular IDE drive (which I had lying around doing nothing anyhow), did a clean, standard RH9 install onto it, and got to work to figure out how to find that SATA. (b.t.w -- if you have the exact same board as me then your on board 1000Mbit lan card is *not* supported by the kernel, and you'll have to either download the source code and compile the module from VIA or install some standard PCI card like I did for now)
I got the SATA working using either a kernel 2.4.22-nptl from Rawhide (http://rawhide.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/rawhide/i386/RedHat/RPMS/) in which I manually patched generic.c & generic.h (according to the post linked above) to support the VIA SATA, or by compiling kernel 2.6.0-test8 (the latest, though earlier ones worked too) which has built-in support for this card (make sure you enable support for the VIA chipset, both in the IDE section & in the agpgart section to get proper AGP support)
Take note that if you do this then once you start from a kernel which recognizes the SATA drive your regular IDE drive will become HDE and your SATA drive will become HDA, which means you'll have a problem booting since up until then everything booted from HDA which was the IDE drive (also your swap partitions won't mount since it was on the IDE drive which now moved).
What you need to do is either change the kernel parameters to specify the root filesystem in HDE (and edit /etc/fstab to mount the swap partition from hde instead of hda) or config the kernel to enable "Boot off-board chipsets first support" (found in Device Drivers --> ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL Support in the kernel's menu configuration), setting the "boot from on-board controller" setting in the BIOS to boot from the IDE and not SATA, and adding "ide=reverse" to the kernel parameters in your bootloader.
If you want to be "legacy IDE free" you could try to dd all the IDE drive onto the SATA one once everything is set up as it should be, and leave yourself only with the SATA one.
Another thing I'd try if I didn't have a working system is use the latest Knoppix to boot and see if it finds the SATA drive (or if it can maybe be easily adjusted to) and install Knoppix on the hard-drive (which will give you a debian system, which is always nice.)
Have fun.
Federico Bacci wrote:
I have your same problem with the via 8237 sata raid controller, and I want to install a RedHat on a single 80Gb Sata Hard disk.
if you found a solution for this problem, please write me.
thank you. Federico Bacci
