asus a7n8x and redhat 9 with a SATA drive, extremely slow

Hi,

I just had a WD Caviar "Speial Edition" 1200jb drive crash so I replaced
it with a Hitachi 80 GB, 7200 RPM, 8 MB drive. The system was incredibly
slow as though I were loading my files across a 56k modem (it takes 17
seconds to load mozilla). The CPU is an Athlon 2700+ and it has 512 MB
of Corsair, "Extreme", pc3500 RAM.

There is a Silicon Image Linux driver on the Asus web site. I have tried
to install it at Redhat install time with "linux dd hde=noprobe
hdg=noprobe". It asks for and reads the sii6512 driver floppy. At boot
time, it stops looking for HDE and HDG when it should be looking for SDA.

When I boot from the floppy, it claims to be booting from /dev/sda3, but
it still sees the SATA as an IDE and goes into a kernel panic and dies
complaining that the /lib/sii6512.o was compiled for a kernel version
2.4.20-8BOOT while this kernel is 2.4.20-8.

I tried the kernel patch, "sh /mnt/floppy/setup-update.sh 2.4.20-8" and
it seemed to work OK, but I get the same boot time delay looking for IDE
drives, it doesn't find the SDA and the performance is still miserable.
The only change it made to the grub.conf was to change initrd from
initrd-2.4.20-8.img to initrd-2.4.20-8.sii6512. The /var/log/messages
file confirms that it sees the SATA as an IDE.

Dec 31 00:20:14 raptor kernel: NFORCE2: IDE controller at PCI slot 00:09.0
Dec 31 00:20:14 raptor kernel: NFORCE2: chipset revision 162
Dec 31 00:20:14 raptor kernel: NFORCE2: not 100%% native mode: will
probe irqs later
Dec 31 00:20:14 raptor kernel: ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf000-0xf007, BIOS
settings: hdaMA, hdbMA
Dec 31 00:20:14 raptor kernel: ide1: BM-DMA at 0xf008-0xf00f, BIOS
settings: hdcMA, hddMA
Dec 31 00:20:14 raptor kernel: SiI3112 Serial ATA: IDE controller at PCI
slot 01:0b.0
Dec 31 00:20:15 raptor kernel: SiI3112 Serial ATA: chipset revision 2
Dec 31 00:20:15 raptor kernel: SiI3112 Serial ATA: not 100%% native
mode: will probe irqs later
Dec 31 00:20:15 raptor kernel: ide2: MMIO-DMA at
0xe080d000-0xe080d007, BIOS settings: hdeio, hdfio
Dec 31 00:20:15 raptor kernel: ide3: MMIO-DMA at
0xe080d008-0xe080d00f, BIOS settings: hdgio, hdhio
Dec 31 00:20:15 raptor kernel: hda: ASUS CD-S400, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
Dec 31 00:20:15 raptor kernel: hde: HDS722580VLSA80, ATA DISK drive
Dec 31 00:20:15 raptor sshd: DSA key generation succeeded
Dec 31 00:20:15 raptor kernel: hdg: no response (status = 0xfe)
Dec 31 00:20:15 raptor kernel: ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
Dec 31 00:20:15 raptor kernel: ide2 at 0xe080d080-0xe080d087,0xe080d08a
on irq 11
Dec 31 00:20:15 raptor kernel: hde: host protected area => 1
Dec 31 00:20:16 raptor kernel: hde: 160836480 sectors (82348 MB)
w/7938KiB Cache, CHS=10011/255/63
Dec 31 00:20:16 raptor kernel: ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide
Dec 31 00:20:16 raptor kernel: Partition check:
Dec 31 00:20:16 raptor kernel: hde: hde1 hde2 hde3

The BIOS shows the Asus CDROM as the primary master and the primary
slave, the secondary master and the secondary slave are all set to NONE.

Since this is going to be a production server outside of the firewall, I
would rather not make custom kernel mods that I will need to manually
keep updated rather than using Redhat's Up2Date. Is there a kernel RPM
with support for this SATA controller? Kernel.org has the 2.6 kernel,
but only in tar.bz2 form and redhat shows only the 2.4.20-8 kernel I
already have installed
(http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/9/en/os/i386/SRPMS). Silicon
Images supports only up to Redhat 8.

Is there a boot parameter which I can put into GRUB to allow it to use
the SATA drive correctly?

Any brilliant ideas appreciated,

BrianP

 

Have you tried running hdparm to see what your drive settings are?