Re: Sata and Ati Xpress 200

["karel04@gmail.com" <karel04@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 7 Feb 2005 11:21:01 -0500, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> > I am having some trouble to install debian on a system with an athlon
> > 64 on a msi board with the relatively new ati xpress 200 chipset.  

> Did XP require a driver disk to provide it with the SATA driver?  If
> not, then the bios is probably set to provide emulation mode on the SATA
> controller, which in my experience (at least with intel chipsets) makes
> it not work right in Linux.  Linux tends to want SATA to be in native
> mode, not any compatibility mode (or combined mode) of any kind.

Thanks Lennart,
this makes things clearer.  It seems I was using the emulation mode. 
Although I read about it in earlier messages, I did not realise that
not enabling RAID (even with a single harddrive) would enable the IDE
emulation mode on this board.  It seem that the RAID part is by
Silicon Image, so I wil play around with the drivers...

>  I assume you used an installer with at least 2.6.8 kernel (sarge installer's 26
> kernel boot option). 

Well, I tried a 2.6.10 kernel from an ubuntu release.  But the AMD 64
debian releases from alioth behaved in a strange way.  At startup it
asks you to choose between linux, linux26, expert and expert26 but
none of the *26 files are found... strange (probably just another
filename).

Anyway, I have found a 10Gig traditional IDE harddisk at work, this
should solve my problems for the moment.

Thanks for the help, I know what to look for now.