Which SATA driver for RHEL4 installation?

[John_Hull@Dell.com]

I think the string is something like "Advanced Host Controller Interface
(ahci)". It definitely doesn't have SATA in the name. Look near the top.


-----Original Message-----
From: Allyn Dimock [mailto:dimock at cs.uml.edu] 
Sent: Friday, March 11, 2005 8:52 PM
To: linux-precision-Lists
Cc: Allyn Dimock; Hull, John
Subject: Which SATA driver for RHEL4 installation?


I have gotten back to tryig to install RHEL WS 4 on a Precision 370,
trying to install using SATA drivers so as to avoid having to re-install
Windows.

The ata_piix driver that gets loaded automatically results in an
eventual error messasge:
              No Drives Found
An error has occurred - no valid devices were found on which to create
new file systems.  Please check your hardware for the cause of this
problem.

Problem: I boot up off a RHEL installation CD and type "expert noprobe"

I get a list of drivers that I could load but none is obviously for
Intel AHCI:
Listed SATA drivers are
  K2 SATA controllers (ixgb)
  Promise SATA SX8 block driver (sx8)
  Promise SATA controllers (sata_promise)
  Promise SX4 SATA controllers (sata_sx4)
  SIS SATA controllers (sata_sis)
  Silicon Image SATA controllers (sata_sil)
  VIA SATA controllers (sata_via)
  VSC7174 SATA controllers (sata_vsc)
  nVidia NForce SATA controllers (sata_nv)

There are also RAID controllers ips, gdth, and megaread_mbox, one or
more of which might handle SATA -- but my system was built without RAID.

If I had a driver disk I could supposedly mount it in hda or hdb (A bit
surprising since I only have one hard disk and no floppy drive).  So a
driver on a disk is not an option...

I note tthat Ian Mortimer's message of Thu Mar 3 16:19:00 2005 seems to
indicate that he was successful in using "expert noprobe" to install a
ahci driver on a 670.

Any advice for me?  (I strongly prefer to have both Windowss and Linux
both using the ahci SATA controller if possible).

Thanks.

-- Allyn