Asus K8N motherboard and SATA HD

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 02:06:45PM -0400, Meng Cheah wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I have an Asus K8N motherboard  with 2  IDE controllers and 2 SATA 
> (150Mb/s) connectors.
> In BIOS, they show as:
> Primary IDE Master           (hda, HD)
> Primary IDE Slave              (hdb, HD)
> Secondary IDE Master       (hdc, CDROM)
> Secondary IDE Slave        
> 
> I installed a Seagate SATA (3.0Gb/s) 750G drive.
> 
> Both Windows and Debian Etch (dual boot) did not detect it, neither did 
> Knoppix.
> I had jumpered the drive for 150Mb/s. The Asus K8N does not support the 
> 3.0Gb/s version of SATA.
> 
> I updated the BIOS which added
> Third IDE Master
> Fourth IDE Master
> but it still would not detect the SATA drive.
> 
> fdisk -l shows only hda and hdb.
> dmesg shows
> <snip>
> libata version 2.00 loaded.
> sata_nv 0000:00:0a.0: version 2.0
> ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LTID] BIOS reported IRQ 0, using IRQ 22
> ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LTID] enabled at IRQ 22
> ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:0a.0[A] -> Link [LTID] -> GSI 22 (level, 
> low) -> IRQ 177
> PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:0a.0 to 64
> ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x9F0 ctl 0xBF2 bmdma 0xC800 irq 177
> ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x970 ctl 0xB72 bmdma 0xC808 irq 177
> scsi0 : sata_nv
> ata1: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
> scsi1 : sata_nv
> ata2: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
> <snip>
> 
> I suspect that the motherboard is problematic as even after updating the 
> BIOS,
> the SATA connectors show up as Third IDE Master and Fourth IDE Master.
> 
> Can anyone help out?
> Otherwise, I'll have to return it for an IDE drive :-)

I don't know the K8N, but I certainly run SATA drives on the A8V with no
problems so far.  Now based on what I have read, seagate has
historically been really bad at making broken SATA firmware on their
drives.  Personally I have used WD drives and never had a problem with
compatibility yet.

Can you set the BIOS to native SATA rather than emulating IDE?  I never
did have much luck with the legacy emulation and it really shouldn't be
needed anyhow.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists