Linux and SATA

[syntax]

Greetings from the States,

I'm thinking about building a new linux box using SATA drives.

Any general suggestions?

[asklepios]

SATA support in Linux is still in its initial phase. at least as far as at the time of installation is concerned. the problem is that none of the distros are coming pre-packaged with the 2.6 kernel which supports SATA quite well.
iirc Mandrake 9.2 and SuSE support some SATA controllers inherently and thus at the time of installation you can directly install on SATA drives but i would recommend checking with the manufacturer about the Linux support. some of the manufacturers provide drivers that you can load before installation of the distro (SuSE provides the option, or so i have read) just like in Windows XP installation.
another thing that you can do is a cross installation i.e. you install your distro of choice on an IDE drive and then install on SATA drive from the distro itself using a custom kernel. so there are choices and solutions but you need to dig around a bit ;)

[syntax]

Thanks asklepios,

Will do so.

On another note. I'm having some interesting anomalies with another box.

ASUS P5A board
AMD K62-450 proc
256M RAM
Award BIOS v4.51PG
ASUS ACPI BIOS revision 1007.A

hda and cdrom on IDE 0
hdc and hdd on IDE 1

SuSE 8.2 installed (2.4.20 kernel)

Anomaly 1:

BIOS does not detect "Primary Slave HDD" (huh?)

Anomaly 2:

Bootloader has been written to /dev/hda, however, when I attempt to boot off the drive I get the following:

L 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01
01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01
01 01 01 etc... (one full screen)

Booting from floppy is o.k., but cdrom is not.

Attempted to reinstall distro and installer wants to write bootloader to /dev/hdc!?!

Any ideas?

[minibubba]

Anomaly 2:

Bootloader has been written to /dev/hda, however, when I attempt to boot off the drive I get the following:

L 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01
01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01
01 01 01 etc... (one full screen)

Booting from floppy is o.k., but cdrom is not.

that means your bootloader is screwed up. fix it and you'll fix that^

as for your secondary ata, check the connections, something may have come loose. Which may be why you can't boot from the CD