# VIA VT8237 SATA problems [SOLVED: New mobo with nForce]

## Peacefaker

I have read all other posts about problems with VIA SATA, and tried everything short of sacrificing the goat. No, this is not a new installation merely an add-on hdd.

If i just leave it, it's detected as hde but I get "interrupt lost" alot of times. Then if I even try to touch it the machine locks.

With the parameter "hde=ide-scsi" I don't get any errors but no disk either.

I run 2.6.1-love5 and have IDE, SCSI, SATA built in kernel

Mobo: MSI KT6 Delta FISR (MS-6590)

NB:KT600 SB:VT8237

Not possible to set any compability mode for sata. AFAIK

If someone has it working, please give an as detailed description as posible of how you did it.

Edit: I knew MSI was a bad buy, EPoX is quality all over and 20? cheaper too.Last edited by Peacefaker on Tue Jan 27, 2004 2:16 pm; edited 1 time in total

----------

## Peacefaker

Ok, forget about it.

I have had nothing but trouble(lookups at FSB only 1MHz over stock 400MHz, constant crashes under windows at speeds over 333MHz FSB) from this mobo since I got it.

So I will have it replaced, probably by an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe or something. I found after some looking that MSI had made the VIA sata into some kind of pseudo-SATA, aparently you can only use sata if you don't use both IDE channels.

Hopefully an nForce2 mobo with Silicon image sata will be better.

----------

## Loke

I just bought a Shuttle SN85G4 with Silicon Image SATA 3512A chip, and I get "lost interrupt" all the time too. Ive patched the kernel to support the 3512, but it will lose the interrupt either during format or within 5 minutes.

So dont bet on a new mobo will solve your problems  :Sad: 

----------

## marsclic

Just wanted to let everybody know that I've been using the MSI K8T Neo, an Athlon64 3200, and 2 raptors in a Linux RAID 0 configuration with some success. The kernel is gentoo-dev-2.6.1, which has support for the 8237 SATA ports. 

A few words of caution, though: Although I love Reiserfs, I have seen some file corruption problems that don't seem to be related specifically with running x86-64. But since I had a few system files corrupted after a freeze (RAM timing-related), I switched back to ext3. It seems to be working great for now. So my advice is to run your RAM on a slower timing when you are using 2 banks (Athlon 64 only, Opterons are ok). DO NOT OVERCLOCK when using the SATA ports, it will cause major corruption issues with the 8237. I suspect this is related to the North Bridge not having a lock on the PCI frequency.

Compile the kernel (2.6.1 and up) with SCSI support. If using "make menuconfig",  in the SCSI low-level drivers section you will find an entry to the SATA drivers. Enable it and then you will find the driver for the VIA 8237. DO NOT ENABLE this driver and the VIA82CXXX IDE PATA driver, it will cause segfaults and kernel freezes. The problem now is that the PATA drives are not using DMA because the generic IDE driver does not know how to enable it.   :Sad: 

Anybody knows how to get around this ?

----------

## marsclic

Ok I got around it by using the standard VIA82CXX IDE driver, and NOT the SCSI SATA drivers. Again, my main problem was that the SATA drives were using DMA, while the generic IDE driver could not enable it for the PATA drives.  In the 2.6.1 kernel, the VIA82CXXX driver knows how to handle the SATA drives. The only inconvenience is that the driver maps the SATA drives to /dev/hde and /dev/hdg instead of the /dev/sda and sdb used by the SCSI SATA drivers. The advantage is that, after some benchmarking with bonnie++, it turned out the VIA82CXXX driver is a little faster than the SCSI SATA driver. So there it is, I hope this helps a little for people having problems with the VIA8237 chipset.

----------

## Loke

I got around the problem by disabling the APIC support in the kernel. Since then 2.6.2-mm-rc1 has been working nicely.

----------

## Peacefaker

Well the new mobo is fine a EPoX EP-RDA3+, no lost interrupts, no "acpi=off" to make it work, has dual realtek nics= no nvnet. Now I only have one little problem: no portage! This is due to filesystem corruption I tested it out to bad ram, A kingston hyperX that constantly fails at 158.7MB, I get new monday, until then I run a pair of old Kingmax DDR266 in dual-ddr mode.

----------

## Davitelj

I have EPoX 8RDA3+ and SATA is working perfectly. HOW DO YOU HAVE BOTH RTL NIC's???? I have one RTL and one NV

----------

## Loke

Just a note: APIC and ACPI is *not* the same thing - easy to mix those two...

----------

## Peacefaker

Well I read from the manual about the nics, I have both working fine but lspci detects one Realtek and one nVidia

From the manual:	Embedded RTL8291BLPHY

				Embedded RTL8101L

----------

## chrisdupre

I've got a ide HD with no problems.  Keep the mb and get a ide HD.

----------

## rantenki

I tried forever to get this board to correctly use the VIA SATA interface. I ended up plugging into the Promise SATA header, and compiling: the promise ATA-raid, SATA support, Promise-SATA and ATA-SCSI all into the kernel (NOT as modules, that didn't work). Otherwise I followed the regular installation exactly. 

Note that I never had a problem booting the Livecd and autodetecting the drive as /dev/sda.

I am now compiling my system faster than anything I have ever seen before, and have a working SATA 74G Raptor  :Wink: 

----------

