CentOS - Mar 2006 - HP DL140G2 and SATA woes

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

-- 
Ray Van Dolson
Linux/Unix Systems Administrator
Digital Path, Inc.

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

On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 05:14:05PM +1100, John Newbigin
wrote:
> 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.
> 
Thanks John, I ended up doign something similar.  On install, I just tell my
PXE server to pass ide0=noprobe and ide1=noprobe to the kernel.  This allows
ata_piix to find the drives correctly.

Will see if I continue to have to pass those options even after install.

Ray