Help,, ready to give up on ATA66!

[pg]

I have been trying to get the new box running of an ATA66 PCI controller for several days now. I have tried everything I can think of and am getting to the point of removing it totally. The card is a SIIG card with a Highpoint 366 chip flashed to the 1.25 bios. It is plugged into a Abit BH6 and has two 30gig Mastor ATA66 drives plugged into it. I am booting of a 6gig Fujitzu running off IDE1, the seconadary IDE is disabled.

Whenever I boot RedHat 7.1 it picks up the Highpoint Controller no problem, however, it only shows the drives (both of them)as 2114MB, the Cylinders, 4096 approx, is totally wrong it should be 16383.I made a entry in LILO like so

hde=noprobe
hde=cyl,heads,sectors (16383,16,63)

still didnt work, showed as 2114MB in dmesg. I tried changing the cylinders to 59,554 same thing! I am running Linear in LILO as well.

It seems RedhAt is seeing both drives fine, it just cant determine what there capacity properly. On a side not I grabbed a HP368 raid card and stuck it in to see what would happen and it had the same issue.

Any suggestions would be appreciated...

[bdg1983]

Not sure if this will help, but try the HPT366 HowTo (http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/%7Eb6506063/hpt366/) and pay attention to the section near the bottom on disk geometry.

Hope it helps.

[pg]

thanks for the reply.... most of the info was in refernce to the OLD kernel, however I went through it to no avail. Still got the same problem...

I did run this command...
hdparm -i /dev/hde

and determine that although the drive is determined by Linux as LBA Compatable it doesnt seem to be runnin in LBA Mode. Does anyone know how I can force Linux to run these drives in LBA Mode?

Thanks

pg

[pg]

further testing....

I took out a drive from another computer of mine, Maxtor 13 gig ATA33 and stuck it in the Linux box attached to the ATA66 card. It detected properly as a 13gig running in ATA mode showing 25249 cylinders!! I am real confused now. Seems now that this is related to the two 30 gig drives in some way.

pg

[Craig McPherson]

You can only set a drive as LBA in the BIOS.

Changing a drive to LBA will destroy all data on the drive.

You're supposed to set the drive to LBA in the BIOS before you partition or use the drive.

[pg]

THere is no info on the drives :) also the drives are running off a SIIG (Highpoint 3.66) ATA66 card and it doesnt seem to give me the option of setting to LBA

pg

[bdg1983]

Nothing in the Highpoint documentation either from the product purchase or from their website? Any online support/usergroups for Highpoint?

You may be able to find a solution from their website. Is their a configuration utility included you can use to change to LBA?

[pg]

I have searched everywhere,including google.com,as a matter of fact I have been searching for several days now. I still have not been able to remedy this and am thinking it may be a imcompatability issue between the PCI highpoint card, The Abit BH6 and Linux.

I even tried moving the controller to different slots and totaly disconnecting the onboard IDE drives, nothing.

pg

[Remi D]

Here is a suggestion.

Go check the list of hardware compatibility on Red hat website for your Controller. If it's present in the list you will know that there is a way to make it work.

:)

[pg]

I have done that, the card is based on the Highpoint 366 chipset, and is suppported under the new 7.1 kernal

pg

[bdg1983]

Can you make the changes to the Highpoint through it's bios? Is there a way to access the bios? CTRL-A or similar during boot.

Quite a few people have reported problems when transferring disks from the PIIX channels to the HPT366 controller. Manuël Beunder wrote in and explained that PIIX defaults to LBA mode while HPT366 defaults to CHS mode, and the different modes produces different disk geometry mappings even for the same disk.

[pg]

You can access the card by typing ctrl-h on boot, however, there is no option for changing anything in there. I have flashed the bios with three different versions to no avail. I got upset withit finally today and ordered a 3ware hardware raid card, will give me ATA66 and Raid 1, and is native to Linux. Would still like to know wht the problem is between these components now though.

pg

[pg]

Just to follow up...

I picked up the 6200 3ware card, stuck it in and it works like a charm right out of the box..


thanks for all the help

pg