Hi all,
I got a new Dell computer at work and I use Slackware 10.1. The
damn thing has a SATA drive on it. I had to change the bios to enable
"legacy" whatever to get it to work. It actually works fine but doing an
hdparm -tT /dev/hda yeilds some pretty crappy results. I also notice the
speed decrease as compared with my simlar EIDE home computer. How does a
person get SATA to run on Linux. I've tried but I'm at a point where I'm
willing to give up on it and live with it because I've already invested
too much effort in the task. I'm running kernel 2.4.29 which I understand
is supposed to support SATA. Any advice would be appreciated.

And please, no advice on upgrading to Slackware 10.2 or some other distro.
I'm not in a position to do that at this time. I have so much
customizaton on my system that it takes at least 3 days to get it working
for the tasks I must do. I try to upgrade on a yearly basis because of
this.
--
R. Scott Smith
Slackware on the job, at home, everywhere!

You could first tell us what hard drive and sata controller you have.

On Thu, 24 Nov 2005 22:40:05 +0200, Matti wrote:

> You could first tell us what hard drive and sata controller you have.
The controller is whatever comes with a the Dell on the motherboard. I
don't have any idea and I don't know how to find out. Same with the hard
drive.

I'm not at work so I can't even check the BIOS set up until
Monday. Otherwise I'm not sure how to find out. Is there not a few tests
I could run or something? I'm sorry to have so little information but
this is a standard issue computer for the company. I may be able to find
the person who orders the hardware and ask... or maybe the Windows
installation can tell me?

--
R. Scott Smith
Slackware on the job, at home, everywhere!

"Scott Smith" <meetscott@netscape.net> wrote in message
newsan.2005.11.25.08.49.28.168056@netscape.net.. .
> On Thu, 24 Nov 2005 22:40:05 +0200, Matti wrote:
>
>> You could first tell us what hard drive and sata controller you have.
> The controller is whatever comes with a the Dell on the motherboard. I
> don't have any idea and I don't know how to find out. Same with the hard
> drive.

Then it's on the motherboard, and can be looked up by logging into the Dell
site with the "service tag" you can read off the back of your machine, and
which some Dell's also have on the front. Dell support is pretty good.

> I'm not at work so I can't even check the BIOS set up until
> Monday. Otherwise I'm not sure how to find out. Is there not a few tests
> I could run or something? I'm sorry to have so little information but
> this is a standard issue computer for the company. I may be able to find
> the person who orders the hardware and ask... or maybe the Windows
> installation can tell me?

See above, and you can poke around for driver and hardware information in
/proc. /proc/pci is a good place too look, as is /proc/scsi for SATA
controllers. Do note that a lot of built-in SATA controllers are from
Promise, because they're cheaper, but Promise controllers suck really hard.

Update,

I went ahead and installed a different kernel. This stuff is always so
risky on my work computer. It would require ruining someone elses
productivity if I screw anything up and can't use my system. I have
everything working now and it's very fast. I'm not convinced that SATA is
worth the effort though. Still don't know which hardware it actually is.

So the moral of the story is that SATA available and a pain in the ass.
Didn't realize Slackware was offering a SATA enabled kernel (and config
file). This is a handy thing, save a lot of time configuring your own.

--
R. Scott Smith
Slackware Linux on the job, at home, everywhere!