[clug] sata card+drive on old system woes

[Nemo]

On Wed, 22 Aug 2007 12:33:28 +1000, Paul Wayper <paul.wayper at anu.edu.au> wrote:

> 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)?

yup, it boots happily with the sata card and no drives, but once that drive
is in then things go downhill. With other pata drives removed, no change. 

The BIOS is correctly finding all PATA, the SATA card's bios correctly
finds it's drive as well. 


> 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.

Yeah, I'll try a bit of testing that tonight... I think it's only 300w,
so might be pushing it a bit (4 drives, mobo, cpu fan, 2 further case
fans)


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

My own limited hardware stocks may trouble that a bit, but have been
and will continue to do... :)


>> 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... :-)

I just googled... that the -C has no onboard video. 2RU case means
I have one half-height PCI slot, and 2 full height PCI (via a 90degree
riser) slots available. Video, network, SATA = I'd not be able to 
make use of it without even more trouble... :/

.../Nemo