Linux SATA problem with Abit IP35-E
Just a brief revelation to share with any readers (perhaps they stumble here through Google, or by some horrible accident :).
I’ve had an Abit IP35-E motherboard in my HTPC setup for six months now, and while a great overclocking board, stable and packed with nice features (yeah, right, this is the budget version), I haven’t been able to coerce my Debian Lenny installation copied from previous IDE hard drive, or any Linux Live-CD to properly recognize my 500GB Samsung SATA hard drive.
Because booting to Linux rebooted with USB keyboard on, and IRQ options sometimes seemed to work their magic and temporarily get me to login prompt, I figured there was some IRQ conflict at work. I searched for the fix just half a year ago with no luck, but after 5 months of complete Linux abstince (spelled that wrong, I did), I stumbled upon an article in (now defunct) Fatwallet.
Turns out all I needed was to swap SATA cable from SATA1 port to SATA5 to avoid IRQ conflicts. Voila, now everything works great, no IRQ conflicts there (only SATA1-SATA4 ports conflict with USB controller).
Hope this helps someone!
8 comments
2$:
You, sir, are a saint. I’ve had mine just over six months as well and nothing recognizes my maxtor 500G. I was just about to reload linux and was checking to see if a fix had been concocted… and here it is.
Thank You.
Jon:
Thank you very much, have had the same problem for a few months now, tried all different bios settings, and right here were the answer.
Greetings from Norway(as you can see by the spelling;)!
Prailurus:
Unfortunately, we lose one of the main benefits to SATA technology when we do this– NCQ. Putting it in port 5 or 6 tells it to operate in PATA mode. Linux recognizes this. Some driver issues with the SATA mode though.
:(
I want Linux though so I put up with it, too.
Rune:
I just want to add that if you have the IP35 Pro or IP35 Pro XE, change the SATA mode in your BIOS from IDE to ACHI. This has worked for some (see link below). This isn’t possible with the non-Pro IP35 boards though.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=698912
Tim Reynolds:
Nice post. Thank you for the info. Keep it up.
The Owl:
I have just got one of these boards and was lucky enough to have been in the transition of moving from windoze to linux when I upgraded my system. At first, it would not recognise my linux install at all (installed on my 500gb SATA drive) nor would it boot up XP but all of the drivers etc I could find were XP based so I figured I’d try that route first and then come back to linux when I made sure it was all running. No chance! I still had no luck after formatting my SATA drive back t NTFS and trying a fresh XP install. So I thought “why not try the LinuxMint live cd?” and guess what – no problems at all. I am now back up and running with a fresh install of Mint. I guess I will probably try to get XP back soon (I still havent made a complete break unfortunately) but this distro seems to have done the job that other OSs failed miserably at!
specialmias:
Good god I love you. It took me all night to figure that out….
specialmias:
To clarify in my case I was booting from USB and had an IRQ conflict with my regular ATA drive attached via ribbon cable. Disconnected that and boom here we are