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Showing posts with label linux ubuntu SB600 FX790. Show all posts
Showing posts with label linux ubuntu SB600 FX790. Show all posts

5/8/12

Sunsway/ST Lab PCI ATA133 2P SATA-PATA cards

Updated:  May 10th 2012

This is a PCI card that basically has two IDE ports. You can upgrade the BIOS on the card and get a Medley RAID controller feature, which will give you RAID modes 0,1 and 10.



While I was experimenting with some faulty hardware, power to one of the 4 disks in the RAID must have failed, and while the disk was not missing from the Set, per se, something had happened to it.

And lo and behold, their driver software delivers (Silicon Image Software). It rebuilt two disks that had problems. While the rebuild took place, Windows complained about a faulty hard disk presemt.

Various stages during RAID rebuild

Various stages during RAID rebuild

Good drivers !

6/14/11

Recent Linux kernels doesn't like SB600 the chipset?

It seems kernels that came after or shortly after 2.6.24-29 does not support ATI's SB600 south bridge chipset that powers AMD's FX790 platform.

I've tried all recent Ubuntu variants as well as the newest OpenSUSE, FreeBSD and others. All of them fail to detect my SATA disks (because it doesn't detect the SCSI/SATA interface) and it's getting annoying now.
I can always install a module for a sound or network card. It would be different if it wasn't the hard disks.

I even tried several 'alternate ISO installs' and those found my disk during install and all went well, but it seems it couldn't just use that same driver again when the OS was supposed to boot. That would be too clever.

It appears that Ubuntu Hardy and it's forks are the last ones to operate my computer. Slackware 13.37 actually found my disks, but did not find my network interface.Sadly, I don't know much about Slackware and so I could not be bothered to figure out how to locate and install a proper driver. I've been dealing mostly with Ubuntu and it's Debian-based layout and tools.A commodity Realtek chipset from 4 years back MUST be supported in every distro. So must the SB600 chipset too!

I have installed an 8.04 based Mint version but it seems I somehow I managed to nuke all the Linux MBR's. (I am looking at you, various bootloaders that doesn't operate on the principle of least surprise).

Instead of shoveling out distros with less and less hardware support, why don't they cut down on other bloat instead? I am really excited about Puppy Linux and it's future, because it seems like this is the approach they take on it.

And so I can only boot into Windows at the moment. Oh the irony!