SATA Hard Drive Issue

[chriisb]

I recently got a Dell Dimension 8400 with a 160 GB Western Digital Serial ATA Hard Drive and tried to install Redhat 9 and then Fedora Core 2. Neither distro would recognize the hard drive so I looked in the BIOS for the option to make the SATA drive act like a PATA drive but could not find that option either. Are there any other options that I could try? I really wanted to dual boot with Windows, but I am afraid I might not be able to... Thanks.

 

[franklin97355]

You need to tell the install to use drivers for the SATA. I don't know which drivers you need to specify or how to specify them.

 

[aleonhardt]

I had the same issues with a SATA-Raid with SuSE 8.x/9.x .. go to the vendor site of your controller and look for a Linux module, then, before starting the installation, you can load additional modules into your installation-kernel, so put in your disk and load the module. Then install, and it will work .. you possibly have to re-load the module manually before a clean start after all installation processes .. make your own initrd to be sure, that the module is loaded everytime your kernel boots...

-Alex

 

[wickedImp]

*Chuckles*

You guys got further than I did. SATA RAID on a 8.0 Redhat Distro just doesn't work!

I heard that Fedora and Vector linux both support SATA now.

Sometimes I think you need to leave technology to mature a little. lol

Imp

 

[chriisb]

Thanks for the posts guys, I couldn't find the module from Western Digital but I found out I was overlooking the switch in the BIOS to make it perform as a PATA hard drive. Thanks a lot!

 

[Greenie172]

Chriisb -
I am having the same trouble you were, with a Dell Dim. 8400. After you made the switch in BIOS to make the HD perform as PATA, were you able to run Windows again? I have the situation where I have to keep switching the HD setting in the BIOS depending upon which operating system I want to use. Perhaps someone has a solution to this frustrating problem?