[clug] sata card+drive on old system woes

[Paul Wayper]

Nemo wrote:
> 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... 
>   
I've had similar problems with a newish Via EPIA M-6000 system which has 
two SATA connectors on board.  With one particular SATA drive plugged 
in, it will boot but not see any SATA drives at all and it chugs away at 
the 'detecting IDE devices' screen as if there's some kind of bus 
problem.  Without that in there it will happily boot and run.  I bought 
a ?ATA to USB adapter to try it out but it's been one of those 'spare 
time' projects since the stuff on the disk isn't actually needed 
day-to-day.  I haven't tried the hotplug process, partly because I 
didn't trust the board to actually detect it after the POST, and partly 
because I didn't want to have to do that each time the power might go 
down (it's meant to be an unattended webserver).

Does the machine boots OK without any SATA drives plugged into it (if 
you can boot to a CD or PATA drive)?

Is the power supply up to starting everything up at boot time?  I know 
that everything might sound like it has wound up but still have not 
initialised correctly or in time.  That could be the problem with my 
machine, again something I haven't tried out yet - getting a separate 
PSU to run the drives or a larger capacity PSU to run the whole system 
temporarily might be a good test.

Apart from that, the usual mix-and-match testing rules apply.


> 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 :)
>   
I think I actually still have my old CUSL2-C motherboard around 
somewhere... :-)

HTH,

Paul