I recently purchased a Seagate 1.5 TB drive to attach to the Promise Fasttrak SATA 376 (PDC20376) controller on my Asus A7V8X motherboard. After installing the drive, I went into the FastTrak setup and configured a simple array which consisted only of this drive. At this point I noticed the FastTrak setup could not identify the drive's size, none the less it reported the array as functional upon reboot and showed what appeared to be the Cylinder/Sectors/Head count for the array. Next, I proceeded to install a rather recent copy of Kbuntu with kernel version 2.6.20. The Kbuntu installer found the array and installed without incident. However upon trying to boot into the newly installed copy of Linux, Grub stopped at stage 1.5 with an error code of 17. I've read that this error code is usually the result of Grub not being able to identify the type of file system or that Grub's drive mapping didn't match the one used by the bios. As I only have the one drive in the system, it seems unlikely that Grub was misconfigured. Upon having little success installing Linux, I attempted to install Windows XP to see if it's boot loader suffered from the same problem. To my surprise, the Windows boot loader also halted with an error. The error was "A drive read error has occurred. Please press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart." As a result of both Linux and Windows failing to boot, I believe this problem may be a result of firmware/bios used for the on-board Promise SATA controller, which unfortunately is embedded in the system bios. Asus's technical support indicated that even if this is the case they will _not_ release an updated bios for this board. In any event, there are a few things I have yet to try. Like (1) trying the latest kernel version and sata_promise driver during install, (2) using a newer version of Grub, and (3) attempting to boot the drive using another SATA controller. If neither 1 nor 2 correct the issue and the drive operates fine under 3 then my only option is to update the firmware/bios for the on-board controller to see if it resolves the issue. The current firmware/bios version of the controller as reported by FastTrak is 1.00.0.21 which is provided with the latest Asus bios release for this motherboard. After a lot of searching I have been unable to find a firmware/bios revision newer than the one I currently have for this chip. However, I did see that Promise has a 1.00.0.37 bios/firmware for their FastTrak S150 TX2plus card. This card uses their PDC20371 chip and the features it provides seem fairly similar to those of the PDC20376, but it's unknown if its firmware/bios would be compatible with the PDC20376. I'm therefore left wondering what differences exist between these two chips and whether or not using the firmware/bios for the PDC20371 with the PDC20376 could cause any major damage. Can anyone familiar with these chips foresee any issues or problems with doing something like this? Regards, David Ellingsworth -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
