On Thu, 23 Dec 2010, Keith Roberts wrote:
To: CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org From: Keith Roberts keith@karsites.net Subject: [CentOS] IT8218 PCI IDE RAID CARD
I have big problems with this card not working on Centos 5.5
If I run Parted Magic (kernel 2.6.32.11) from CD, then the IT8212F IDE PCI controller is detected OK, and I can access the WD hard drive on the controller, in r/w mode.
Running Centos 5.5 I get lots of I/O errors at boot time, and cannot get r/w access to the drive from GParted.
It seems that to get this card to work as a plain non-RAID controller under Centos 5.5, one has to do an overwrite of the PCI controller card's BIOS.
It either works in RAID mode, or ATAPI controller mode as a mass storage controller. There one BIOS upgrade for programming it as a RAID controller, and another BIOS upgrade to program the PCI card as an ordinary IDE controller.
Well I have flashed the BIOS on the ITE8212F PCI controller card with the ATAPI upgrade, and now it appears to the Centos 5.5 kernel as a plain PCI IDE controller - 100% native.
This is just what I needed, as I would like to move all disk I/O intensive stuff onto a small 40GB drive on this controller. So the kernel needs to see this drive at boot time, before the kernel has a chance to load any dynamic drivers.
Kind Regards and a very Happy Christmas to all,
Keith Roberts