Brent Busby wrote:
> On Sat, 11 Sep 2010, Lindsay Haisley wrote:
>
>> Ugh!!  This sounds like the roadblock I ran into!  The problem
>> drive, /dev/hda, holds the root filesystem and several others, and
>> didn't show up at all in /dev.  Since the system also has several SATA
>> drives, I'm using the sata_promise kernel module for these, but the SATA
>> system on the MB is managed by a Promise chipset, which supposedly
>> implements hardware RAID but it's proprietary so I'm just using plain
>> old discrete non-RAID mode.
>>
>> I have rather a conflict here, since I already have a /dev/sda.
>>
>> Is there a HOWTO for using libata-supported kernel components, and
>> configuring them in the kernel?  The MB has an ICH5 controller hub,
>> which I assume handles the PATA IF.  lspci shows:
>>
>> IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) IDE 
>> Controller (rev 02)
>>
>> The linux kernel here already has CONFIG_ATA_PIIX, which supposedly
>> talks the lingo of the ICH series I/O controller hub.  What else do I
>> need here, or where can I go to learn more?
>
> If you go through the list of drivers in the Sata section, toward the 
> second half of the list, there are Pata drivers.  They used to be 
> deprecated, but now they're the only ones that are supported.  You 
> just need to find the Pata drivers (in the Sata section) that 
> correspond to what you've got (you'll probably have to look around a 
> bit), and then turn off the entire old Pata section.  There should 
> probably be a Pata driver in the new Sata section though that handles 
> Intel PIIX chipset; it's pretty common.
>
> The danger that will make you want to keep a rescue CD handy is that 
> it's hard to predict how your devices are going to get enumerated at 
> bootup under these new semantics, or to know whether it will match 
> what you've got in your fstab.  If you need a good rescue CD though, 
> I'd recommend System Rescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org/), which is 
> based on Gentoo and handles about anything.
>

Noticed something in another reply that I thought I would mention right 
quick.  My mobo has on board IDE controller.  I also have a SATA PCI 
card with a drive connected to it as well.  This may help you to know.  
When I recently converted mine over to PATA/SATA, it sees the drive on 
the SATA controller first then the drives connected to the mobo.  So, 
you may want to anticipate that the SATA drives will be sda, sdb and so 
on, then any drives connected to your mobo afterwards.  This was 
somewhat of a surprise when I did this.  Thank goodness grub is pretty 
forgiving and helps the idiot in the chair.  lol   I wasn't sure where 
my root partition was anymore.

Hope that helps just in case you have something similar.

Dale

:-)  :-)