[CentOS] HP DL140G2 and SATA woes

Tue Mar 21 01:49:43 UTC 2006
Ray Van Dolson <rayvd at digitalpath.net>

Posted a similar version of this to the RHEL4 list...

I'm having trouble getting CentOS 4.2 installed on a DL140G2 with two SATA
drives.  I am doing a PXE install, so I do not have a CD-ROM drive in the
system and this appears to have the side-effect that both SATA drives are
caught by the Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver before ata_piix can catch
it.

As soon as I hook an IDE CD-ROM up to the system, the ata_piix driver
somehow can get access to the SATA drives first and they use the SCSI
subsystem and I get infinitely better performance.

However, I have to disconnect one of the SATA drives to attach a CD-ROM
drive (don't have a power splitter currently).  Without the CD-ROM drive,
dmesg shows the IDE driver assigning hda and hdc to my two SATA drives --
and later:

ata_piix version 1.03
ata_piix: 0x1f0 IDE Port busy
ata_piix: probe of 0000:00:1f.2 failed with error -16

Booting with noprobe doesn't appear to solve this problem.  My current
thought is to modify the modules.pci, etc stuff to have my PCI device id not
match up with the IDE driver.

Any other suggestions?

Ray

-- 
Ray Van Dolson
Linux/Unix Systems Administrator
Digital Path, Inc.