SATA drives not detected during install

[susewop]

Hi all,

I have recently bought an AOpen LE300 motherboard with NVidia GeForce7050/NForce630a chipset. I have attached two Seagate 1.5 Tb SATA drives but they are not detected in the installation process with Yast. I have tried loading by hand the module sata_nv, but although it seems to load properly, I cannot still see the SATA drives.

In the HCL list I have seen that other people have succeeded installing openSuse in other motherboards with the same chipset, so I suppose that it is possible to make these drive work.

Someone could give me some advice of how can I load this sata_nv module properly or how can I see a more detailed information of what is happening during the installation process to see where is the failure?

Many thanks in advance.

Jose

[Knurpht]

Do you see the drives when you enter the BIOS of the motherboard?

Can you post output of:

fdisk -l

ls -l /dev/sd*

This would give us information about whether the system sees the devices.

If the disks are brandnew, there might very well be no filesystem on them. That would mean it's normal you don't see them, since there's nothing on them to mount. If this is the case, start Yast - System - Partitioning. That's where it's done, configuring new disks, and giving the a mount point, so that you can access them.

[susewop]

Hi Knurpht,

Thanks very much for your response.

I can give you more details about my system. It is an AOpen LE300 barebone with the following characteristics:

- AOpen nmcp68pvnt-hd motherboard
- AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+
- 1 GB RAM DDR2 800 Mhz
- 2 Seagate 7200 1.5 Tb SATA drives
- No CDROM drive

In BIOS setup I cannot see the drives, maybe because I dont know where to look for the information.

I have tried what you have asked me (booting with GParted LiveUsb) and here are the results:

1. fdisk -l (Semms that only returns info from two pendrives that I had attached - sda with 1Gb and sdb with 2 Gb)

Disk /dev/sda: 982 MB, 982449664 bytes
32 heads, 63 sectors/track, 951 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2016 * 512 = 1032192 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x005c0f10

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 951 958576+ 6 FAT16

Disk /dev/sdb: 2021 MB, 2021654528 bytes
63 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1010 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 3906 * 512 = 1999872 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xb0bcd68e

This doesn't look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 ? 825235 888389 123339962 78 Unknown
Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(518, 102, 15) logical=(825234, 44, 50)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(743, 0, 62) logical=(888388, 51, 15)
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdb2 ? 110823 309410 387841909+ 10 OPUS
Partition 2 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(205, 7, 0) logical=(110822, 6, 14)
Partition 2 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(920, 235, 50) logical=(309409, 54, 34)
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdb3 ? 478639 969993 959615034 8b Unknown
Partition 3 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(260, 125, 54) logical=(478638, 40, 56)
Partition 3 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(893, 46, 60) logical=(969992, 62, 35)
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdb4 ? 54664 56795 4161561+ a OS/2 Boot Manager
Partition 4 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(269, 111, 50) logical=(54663, 42, 7)
Partition 4 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(0, 0, 0) logical=(56794, 33, 1)
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Partition table entries are not in disk order



2. ls -l /dev/sd* (Only info from the two pendrives)

brw-rw---- 1 root floppy 8, 0 2009-09-21 22:03 /dev/sda
brw-rw---- 1 root floppy 8, 1 2009-09-21 22:03 /dev/sda1
brw-rw---- 1 root floppy 8, 16 2009-09-21 22:06 /dev/sdb


Yes, the two SATA disks are brand new, but I dont know exactly where is the Yast - System - Partitioning section during the installation process to format them. Nevertheless, I remember that following the wizard I ended up in a partitioning manager where I wasnt able to work with none of the two drives.

If you find that it could be helpful I can send you dumps from the following commands: dmesg, lspci and lsmod. I am not sending them here to prevent being the post too long.

Many thanks for your help. I am a completely newbie in this kind of advanced tasks and any help is much appreciated.

Best regards,

Jose Antonio

[susewop]

In order to shed some light to this issue I can attach the results obtained form the execution of the commands dmesg, lspci and lsmod, which are below.

In dmesg I see that it says something about SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300). I don´t know if it means that there is no SATA device or there is an error.

Hope someone could see something clearer than me. I dont know very well where to go from here.

Thanks in advance,

lspci:
00:00.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP67 Memory Controller (rev a2)
00:01.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP67 ISA Bridge (rev a2)
00:01.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation MCP67 SMBus (rev a2)
00:01.2 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP67 Memory Controller (rev a2)
00:02.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP67 OHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a2)
00:02.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP67 EHCI USB 2.0 Controller (rev a2)
00:04.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP67 OHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a2)
00:04.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP67 EHCI USB 2.0 Controller (rev a2)
00:06.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP67 IDE Controller (rev a1)
00:07.0 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP67 High Definition Audio (rev a1)
00:08.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP67 PCI Bridge (rev a2)
00:09.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP67 AHCI Controller (rev a2)
00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: nVidia Corporation MCP67 Ethernet (rev a2)
00:0b.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP67 PCI Express Bridge (rev a2)
00:0c.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP67 PCI Express Bridge (rev a2)
00:0d.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP67 PCI Express Bridge (rev a2)
00:0e.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP67 PCI Express Bridge (rev a2)
00:0f.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP67 PCI Express Bridge (rev a2)
00:10.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP67 PCI Express Bridge (rev a2)
00:11.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP67 PCI Express Bridge (rev a2)
00:12.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 7050 PV / nForce 630a (rev a2)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control


lsmod:
Module Size Used by
dm_crypt 10900 0
dm_mod 49024 1 dm_crypt
jfs 141740 0
xfs 419620 0
fuse 46236 1
evdev 7852 3
psmouse 42432 0
serio_raw 4480 0
k8temp 3980 0
pcspkr 2068 0
wmi 6180 0
button 5028 0
processor 29540 0
i2c_nforce2 6444 0
i2c_core 20712 1 i2c_nforce2
squashfs 18864 1
loop 12988 2
aufs 119996 1
exportfs 3548 2 xfs,aufs
nls_utf8 1488 2
nls_cp437 5320 2
vfat 8600 2
fat 41000 1 vfat
nls_base 6208 5 jfs,nls_utf8,nls_cp437,vfat,fat
sd_mod 28560 3
crc_t10dif 1632 1 sd_mod
ide_generic 1824 0 [permanent]
ide_pci_generic 3628 0
usb_storage 48220 2
amd74xx 5408 0
ide_core 87588 3 ide_generic,ide_pci_generic,amd74xx
ahci 30032 0
ehci_hcd 29236 0
ohci_hcd 19780 0
ata_generic 4336 0
libata 151780 2 ahci,ata_generic
scsi_mod 131900 3 sd_mod,usb_storage,libata
usbcore 125092 4 usb_storage,ehci_hcd,ohci_hcd
forcedeth 46216 0
thermal 12572 0
fan 4048 0
thermal_sys 13084 3 processor,thermal,fan


dmesg:
[ 2.316671] ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m8192@0xfe026000 port 0xfe026100 irq 31
[ 2.318758] ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m8192@0xfe026000 port 0xfe026180 irq 31
[ 2.320768] ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m8192@0xfe026000 port 0xfe026200 irq 31
[ 2.322718] ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m8192@0xfe026000 port 0xfe026280 irq 31
[ 2.324665] amd74xx 0000:00:06.0: UDMA133 controller
[ 2.326575] amd74xx 0000:00:06.0: IDE controller (0x10de:0x0560 rev 0xa1)
[ 2.328476] amd74xx 0000:00:06.0: IDE port disabled
[ 2.330340] amd74xx 0000:00:06.0: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
[ 2.332219] ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf000-0xf007
[ 2.334075] Probing IDE interface ide0...
[ 2.664011] ata1: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
[ 2.688006] ata2: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
[ 2.689882] ata4: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
[ 2.691709] ata3: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
[ 2.900048] ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
[ 2.964225] ide_generic: please use "probe_mask=0x3f" module parameter for probing all legacy ISA IDE ports

[susewop]

Finally I found the solution of the problem. Not knowing what to do, I decided to open the case and double check again the connection of the two hard drives. To my surprise I noticed then that the power cable wasn´t connected to the mainboard. After plugging it, everything is working fine.

I´m sorry for opening an issue due to a so silly reason. I was blind thinking that the cause of the problem was an incompatilibity between the motherboard and Linux.

Thank for your help.

Jose Antonio