[CentOS] HP DL140G2 and SATA woes

Tue Mar 21 06:14:05 UTC 2006
John Newbigin <jnewbigin at ict.swin.edu.au>

I have had a similar problem on box of mine trying to get DMA working on 
my DVD player.  The solution was to change the order of the modules in 
the initrd.

On my box (which is CentOS-4 with Custom FC4 kernel) I put this in 
/etc/modprobe.conf
alias scsi_hostadapter ata_piix

and then rebuilt initrd with mkinitrd.

and added
ide1=noprobe
to the kernel in grub.conf

That might help.

John.


Ray Van Dolson wrote:

> 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
> 


-- 
John Newbigin
Computer Systems Officer
Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia
http://www.ict.swin.edu.au/staff/jnewbigin