On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 08:44 +0100, Peter Kjellström wrote:
Hello,
I had a very similar problem with a bunch of supermicro boards (X6DVL-EG2). The problem was that the bios somehow confused libata so badly that it fell back to using the old ide legacy whatever thingy (resulting in hda instead of sda and of course no dma).
The solution was to fiddle with the sata settings in bios. Strangely enough, enabling mixed mode (pata and sata) in bios resulted in something the kernel could understand and libata has been happy ever since (reporting combined mode operation in dmesg).
cap makes a very good point. All the sata drives I use are registered as scsi drives and not ide drives (sda and sdb NOT hda and hdb).
try our new 2.6.9-34.EL kernel.
also make sure the motherboard has the latest bios from the manufacturer.