AMD64/SATA installation problems

[James Wilkinson]

Remus wrote:
> I got a new PC with AMD64 and SATA RAID HDDs.
> 
> So when I try to install (I use amd64 install CD) to stops with the message:
> ata1: dev 0 ATA, max UDMA/133 ....
> The line before is more less the same but the beggining is with the SATA.
> 
> Any ideas?
> 
> Can I install Ubuntu/Kubuntu on SATA drive or SATA hardware RAID1 ?

You should be able to install to SATA. But it depends on what sort of
motherboard you have, and what the IDE adapter is. Some are better
supported than others; some adapters need particular settings in the
BIOS.

See http://linux.yyz.us/sata/sata-status.html for more details.

Are you really sure that you have hardware SATA RAID? It's very unusual.

Most SATA RAID is really software RAID [1] designed to look like
hardware RAID. It relies on Windows drivers and support in the BIOS. It
works, as long as that's all you run.

There is software being written (dmraid:
http://people.redhat.com/~heinzm/sw/dmraid/ ) that allows Linux's
device-mapper to detect *some* BIOS-level RAIDs and mount the
filesystems on them. To the best of my knowledge, this hasn't yet made
it as far as the Ubuntu install.

Even if you did this, what you would end up with is Linux software RAID
on an array that happened to be defined in the BIOS (and not by Linux).
The only real benefit over RAID defined by Linux is if you want to
multiple-boot and access partitions on the RAID from different operating
systems.

So if you're not dual-booting, stick to standard Linux RAID.

Also, see http://linux.yyz.us/sata/faq-sata-raid.html for more details.

Hope this helps,

James.

[1] Technically, of course, *all* RAID is in software. It's just whether
the software runs on the host CPU or on the RAID adapter's CPU.

-- 
E-mail address: james | Blessed are the pessimistic, for they take backups.
@westexe.demon.co.uk  |