e-sata question

[Jonas Norlander]

2008/3/19, Donn <donn.ingle at gmail.com>:
> Yo, again :)
>
>  I also got an external drive and while it works via usb, it supports e-sata
>  and I did all the relevant plugging-into the m/b I (think) I need. I also
>  enabled all SATA stuff I could find in the BIOS.
>
>  Gutsy does zip as far as I can see when I turn the drive on. Not a peep in
>  dmesg, nor /var/log/messages and certainly no icon on the desktop.
>
>  Is there something I need to do, or is e-sata a non-starter on Kubuntu?
>
>  \d
>

Hi!

I have a motherboard with eSATA interface, the contacts is built in on
the motherboard.
It's is an extra controller on the m/b named JMicron RAID Controller
and found by kubuntu
as an "SATA controller: JMicron Technologies, Inc. JMicron 20360/20363
AHCI Controller (rev 03)"
and "IDE interface: JMicron Technologies, Inc. JMicron 20360/20363
AHCI Controller (rev 03)"
The drivers that can be related to it are (i think) libata,
pata_jmicron, ahci, sata_nv, ata_generic, pci_hotplug and shpchp.
I have not tested it as i don't have a disk to connect.

Sam Fielder wrote that eSATA could not hotplug but thats wrong
acording to the standard
SATA/eSATA is built to support hot-swapping but the OS drivers must
support it to.
So plugging in the drive after boot should be possible.

In my BIOS i have three options for the controller, IDE, RAID and
AHCI, i think that i need
to set it to AHCI to be able to connect an eSATA drive. Do you have that option?
If the drive is found it should appear as a device under your
dev-tree. Have you checked
if you get any new devices when plugging it in?

/ Jonas