[clug] sata card+drive on old system woes

Nemo wombat at nemo.house.cx
Wed Aug 22 01:26:56 GMT 2007


Hi guys,

I've just been putting together a new (for PIII/933mhz/256MB ram values of 'new')
fileserver and part of the upgrades has resulted in a sata card and drive for
bulking up my storage space. 

Turns out the mobo doesn't play nice with the sata when booting at all. It's
intended to boot from the ide drive... but initially nothing would boot when it
was all plugged in, a mobo bios update later and it would boot ide drives, but
ignore the cdrom, regardless of the bios setting. Hotplugging the sata in *after*
a lilo/grub screen from the CD would give me a clean boot however...

One Debian install later, and it's booting off the harddrive fine with no need to
hotplug. Then last night (half-way through testing new raid), it spontaneously
reverts to original behaviour. It wont boot anything at all with the sata
card+drive plugged in. (the POST completes, gives PCI devices listing, and then
nothing, system hangs with no keyboard response. Power/reset switch only) Again,
hotplug the drive on the grub menu, and it runs smoothly from there... 

So, helpy question/request time. Has anyone encountered this kind of behaviour
before and can give any hints where the problem might be? I'm assuming the sata
card is taking the boot process via a bios extension, and not handing it back.
It is a cheapish sata card unfortunately, but I'm not wanting to lay out more
money on another one in case the problem is with the motherboard (ASUS CUSL2)

Or I could get an ide/sata bidirectional converter so the sata drive appears as
IDE to the motherboard... Has anyone had experience with those? They seem kinda
dodgy.

The other option is to ask if anyone wants to swap old motherboards (it works
fine in all other respects) for something that will work fine for ide and sata
(I don't much care about the mobo spec, so long as the drives talk... (oh, and
it fits in a generic 2RU server case :)

cheers
.../Nemo



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