# VT8237A SATA not recognised

## matthewbot

I'm having a bit of trouble getting the VT8237A southbridge to be recognised, rendering my fancy dual SATA drives useless. None of the stock drivers nor guides in the wiki seem to mention it, just the VT8237. Via_sata and friends seem to do nothing. I've attached my lspci and dmesg output, which does mention "VP_IDE: Unknown VIA SouthBridge, disabling DMA." Anyone have any idea on where to start fixing this? I've attached lspci, and if you need my full dmesg, it may be found here

```

# lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. PT894 Host Bridge

00:00.1 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. PT894 Host Bridge

00:00.2 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. PT894 Host Bridge

00:00.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. PT890 Host Bridge

00:00.4 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. PT894 Host Bridge

00:00.5 PIC: VIA Technologies, Inc. PT894 I/O APIC Interrupt Controller

00:00.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. PT894 Host Bridge

00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI Bridge

00:02.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. PT890 PCI to PCI Bridge Controller

00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237A SATA 2-Port Controller (rev 80)

00:0f.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 07)

00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a0)

00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a0)

00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a0)

00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a0)

00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86)

00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237A PCI to ISA Bridge

00:11.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8251 Ultra VLINK Controller

00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 7c)

00:13.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237A PCI to PCIE Bridge

02:01.0 Audio device: VIA Technologies, Inc. VIA High Definition Audio Controller (rev 10)

03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Unknown device 01df (rev a1)

```

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## nbensa

```
00:11.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8251 Ultra VLINK Controller 
```

Hm... 8251 doesn't have sata support yet. There are patches floating around, but I haven't tried them...

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## matthewbot

Oh, so you mean I have an 8251? Thats great! I've found loads of hacks and patches about it on via's site. Heh, I was looking for info related to the south bridge, didn't realise the host bridge was the important factor. Thanks a lot!  :Smile: 

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## gnupg

Here I have exactly the same case: VT8237A on ASUS P5VDC-X

May be no distro correctly recogize the hard drive (I have tried Debian Etch, Gentoo, etc).

It recognized the SATA controller, though.

Again, any solution or suggestion would be awesome. TIA!

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## matthewbot

Hit the via arena: http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.aspx?catid=28&threadid=71754&highlight_key=y&keyword1=status

The 2.6.17 patches never applied properly to gentoo-sources-2.6.17. You might want to try vanilla-sources, but I like my gensplash. So stick with 2.6.16, and replace (not patch, replace. Sounds bad but works good) ahci.c and via_sata.c inside your kernel sources.

If this doesn't make sense to you, here's your process.

1. Grab an old PATA hard drive.

2. Install a minimal gentoo (be sure to get 2.6.16, not 17) onto the PATA hard drive from a gentoo CD, and boot it

2a. You'll need some new tools. Put -X in your use flags, then emerge mirrorselect elinks.

3. From there, patch up your kernel sources with the 2.6.16 patches from the via arena (you should download them while your still booted on the Live-CD into /mnt/gentoo), make, and reboot

4. If your lucky, you should now have /dev/sda and friends.

5. Perform another install (2.6.16) from your PATA harddrive on to /dev/sda (or if you wana be fancy, clone it from your PATA drive. But I went quickly on the PATA, and wanted to make sure I did it right on my real hard drives)

5a. Use elinks on a seperate console to read the manual while you install.

5b. Be sure to apply the patches to your second kernel, or you system won't boot!

6. reboot off your SATA drives, and you have your gentoo, off your SATA drives.

Despite the seemingly risky operation of entirely replacing two files from a non-vanilla kernel with ones modified for a vanilla, my system runs perfectly. Decent speed too, getting 54 MB/s out of both of my dirves, and 104 MB/s out of my RAID 0. I would reccommend keeping the PATA drive in your system, should you break your install, as no live-CD will be able to see your harddrives to fix your system. The good news is that you can re-install grub from a un-modified grub floppy or CD, should windows whack your MBR. (This kinda confuses me; I think grub has better device support than linux ^_^)

For your sound, you'll need to use external alsa modules. Put media-sound/alsa-driver and media-sound/alsa-header in package.unmask and package.keywords to grab 1.0.12, or higher. Then follow the ALSA guide, opting to not compile ALSA into your kernel but use the modules.

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## cjmayo

I found a plain ubuntu-6.06.1 CD works fine and posted the ide patches for gentoo-sources at #145690

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## FloatBest

Thank you for those patches cjmayo, they work like a charm. I just upgraded to a board with this chipset and was about to give up. I used the Ubuntu-LiveCD to chroot into my Gentoo and tried the patches from ViaArena and a Vanilla 2.6.18, which is supposed to support the VT8237A SATA, but nothing worked. Until now. Thanks again!

FB

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## FloatBest

Install works, instructions here

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