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.
Any ideas what's happening, and why Centos 5.5 cannot get access to the IDE drive on the IT8212F controller card?
Kind Regards,
Keith Roberts
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
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Keith Roberts