# SATA ports 5 & 6 don't appear to be recognized?

## pjp

I've had 2 SATA hard drives (ports 1 & 2) and a DVD drive on port 3 or 4. All working fine.

I purchased 3 new drives (all 5 are the same model, 1TB Samsung). I moved the DVD to port 6, with drives in ports 1 - 5. Ports 5 & 6 are the same physical SATA connector on the motherboard, and neither device is showing up in Linux (BIOS reports OK).

Nothing special is noted about the last two ports as far as I can tell (they aren't RAID only or something like that).

Since it's all the same chipset, I wouldn't have thought anything special needed to be configured. Any ideas?

 *MSI wrote:*   

> On-Board SATA
> 
> • 6 SATA II ports by AMD® SB710
> 
> - Supports storage and data transfers at up to 3Gb/s
> ...

 

----------

## Anon-E-moose

change from ide mode to ahci mode in bios (assuming you are running ahci mode in linux)

what does "lspci -k" return

----------

## pigeon768

CONFIG_SATA_PMP

----------

## pjp

 *Anon-E-moose wrote:*   

> change from ide mode to ahci mode in bios (assuming you are running ahci mode in linux -- it was listed as a RAID option: IDE, AHCI or RAID)
> 
> what does "lspci -k" return

  I tried ahci last night, and it didn't appear to recognize any of the drives that way (unless I missed something, there was one setting to change it for all).

lspci -k

 *pigeon768 wrote:*   

> CONFIG_SATA_PMP

 

```
/boot $ grep PMP config-2.6.36-hardened-r6

CONFIG_SATA_PMP=y
```

Thanks.

----------

## Anon-E-moose

```
00:11.0 SATA controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 SATA Controller [IDE mode]

        Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. Device 7623

        Kernel driver in use: ahci
```

It needs to be in ahci mode to see past 4 drives.

You're using the ahci driver, but the bios is set in ide mode.

Same thing on all systems, when I wanted to use my esata port (sata6) I had to turn on ahci mode.

And yes they look different in bios (ide vs ahci mode) but they work under linux.

----------

## pjp

Hmm, OK, I'll try again. After making that change in the BIOS, POST didn't appear to see any drives and it didn't boot. Maybe I just didn't wait long enough. Thx.

I'm not having much luck finding anything with Google.

----------

## Anon-E-moose

What motherboard are you using? Who makes the bios?

On mine, I had to set it to raid to get ahci mode, even though I don't use raid.

----------

## pjp

It's an MSI 785GM-P45, AMI BIOS.

In AHCI mode, it does recognize the drives, but does not boot. Nor will it boot to DVD. Interestingly, when I change to IDE mode, the boot menu reports the DVD drive in position 2 (POST in IDE or AHCI mode recognizes it in slot 6). May not matter.

Also, for some reason, my original drives show up as sdb & sdc when I boot to a rescue CD. sda is one of the new unconfigured drives. I'll confirm RAID mode and which drives are in which order when booting the OS on HD in IDE mode.

----------

## Anon-E-moose

 *pjp wrote:*   

> It's an MSI 785GM-P45, AMI BIOS.
> 
> In AHCI mode, it does recognize the drives, but does not boot. Nor will it boot to DVD. Interestingly, when I change to IDE mode, the boot menu reports the DVD drive in position 2 (POST in IDE or AHCI mode recognizes it in slot 6). May not matter.
> 
> Also, for some reason, my original drives show up as sdb & sdc when I boot to a rescue CD. sda is one of the new unconfigured drives. I'll confirm RAID mode and which drives are in which order when booting the OS on HD in IDE mode.

 

Ah, you should be able to set boot order for the disks, but I would plug sata 1 into the original sda, just to be on the safe side.

----------

## pjp

AFAIK, I was careful to keep the original disks in the original ports sda is port 1, sdb port 2.

If I revert to IDE mode, the disks are recognized correctly in that order. I didn't have an active boot partition, even though it has booted fine. Unfortunately, making it active didn't help.

Setting the BIOS to RAID mode has some odd results. The RAID ROM (or whatever it is called) only shows 4 disks. But POST and the boot menu see all of them. In RAID mode, I can boot to the rescue CD (not in AHCI mode). The rescue CD in RAID mode sees sda - sde, in the correct order. But it doesn't boot to disk. Perhaps the order is based on how they scan during POST? They don't list in 1 - 6 order. I think it usually lists 5, then the DVD, then others.

I guess I'll try booting each drive from the boot menu.

----------

## Anon-E-moose

 *pjp wrote:*   

> AFAIK, I was careful to keep the original disks in the original ports sda is port 1, sdb port 2.
> 
> If I revert to IDE mode, the disks are recognized correctly in that order. I didn't have an active boot partition, even though it has booted fine. Unfortunately, making it active didn't help.
> 
> Setting the BIOS to RAID mode has some odd results. The RAID ROM (or whatever it is called) only shows 4 disks. But POST and the boot menu see all of them. In RAID mode, I can boot to the rescue CD (not in AHCI mode). The rescue CD in RAID mode sees sda - sde, in the correct order. But it doesn't boot to disk. Perhaps the order is based on how they scan during POST? They don't list in 1 - 6 order. I think it usually lists 5, then the DVD, then others.
> ...

 

I just looked at the manual, and raid sets either ide or some other mode (it didn't show) but probably ahci is in there.

unplug all but the old sda and see if it shows up plugged into sata port 1 (manual shows 1/2 as different than 3-6)

----------

## pjp

Yeah, RAID is IDE, RAID or AHCI. In AHCI mode, the DVD wouldn't boot.

So, with it in RAID mode, it will boot to the "4th" disk in the boot menu. That ends up being sda, with sdb being recognized correctly as well, including sda - sde. So it seems like just figuring out how it determines which disk is connected to which port. I think POST does report the disks in the same order every time, just not 1 - 6. 5, 6, then something like 3 2 4 1. I'll confirm that, as it may be significant to boot order.

So given that SATA 1 & 2 or separate from 3 - 6, I'm wondering if that is affecting boot order. Except that SATA 6 is the DVD, and it shows up in the last boot menu entry. I'll double check cables, but I double checked to make sure SATA 1 was the expected boot drive when I installed them (I didn't want booting to fail because I plugged it into the wrong drive/port).

I wish the BIOS reported the boot order in some way that could be associated with the physical ports.

Thanks for the help. Going to grab something to eat, then get back at it in an hour or so.

----------

## krinn

dunno for your bios, but recent bios don't only allow you to query a boot from disk, but allow the disk order to be set.

i've seen some bios that were exposing it only when you set boot from disk, with a new menu showing all disks, sometimes you can only pickup the first disk (devs were having in mind to allow you to boot from any disk, but they were only wish you to tell what disk will be the boot disk).

Some bios expose the same behavior with a bonus, as when you select the boot disk, it swap the first one with the selected one (boring, but in this case, by playing with swapping, you can select your own disk order).

and more classy bios, simply show you the disk names and you select the disk name you wish on what position you wish (this time devs remember that even you have 10 disks, you might wish to boot from the 9th for a reason, or for a more obscure reason, you may just want your OS to check all your disks until it find a bootflag on one of them)

what you should do is avoid putting the cdrom/dvdrom on slot 5/6, last slots are nearly always use for raid, and keep that in mind lazzy devs always assume many stupid things, so even the slot 5/6 are state to be non-raid, expect a lazzy devs to assume at least a disk there.

putting your dvd on slot 2/3/4 won't change your boot (remember the dvd will grab sr name, no issue with sd name).

what i'm sure of, not putting your driver in ahci would only gave you trouble, as pata was using fixed address to speak with the controller, you were only seeing 1master/slave + 1master/slave (2 address) that was limiting to 4 disks max. And in good old times (hmmm that i never seen because i'm 18 !) people with newer m/b with dual pata were force to disable their old on-board soundcard pata controller in order for that to work.

And i don't remember seen the 2 pata controller max limit was remove (i remember some boards were using 6 or 8 disks but with additional controller running in raid).

----------

## pjp

The BIOS doesn't seem to have any trouble recognizing the disks, and I can set the boot order to any of them. The main trouble there is that they all have the same name, so I don't know which is which.

When in IDE mode, the BIOS scans for disks and reports them as: 5, 6, 1, 3, 2, 4. Using the boot menu, choosing the 3rd disk listed (would that be "1"?), it will boot to what is sda. In RAID mode, I have to select the 4th disk listed to get sda. No idea if the "IDE order" is in any way related to RAID (or AHCI) order.

I'll try moving the DVD to slot 2-4.

Anyway, thanks for the help. I won't get to testing anything else until tomorrow afternoon / evening. The only other thing I was hoping to decipher is if there is any rhyme or reason to which slot is which disk. Seems odd for slot 1 to be the 3rd or 4th disk in the boot menu.

----------

## pjp

I never found a way to map ports to disks, but it works.

AHCI mode will not boot to DVD, regardless of where the DVD is plugged in (tried ports 2, 3 or 6, so I'm reasonably confident the others wouldn't have worked).

I added the 3rd drive, then made sure I could boot. Then I disabled it as a boot option in the BIOS. Repeated for drives 4 & 5 (though I had to disable the 3rd again).

Works, but with no more sense as to why.

Thanks for the help.

----------

