# HDD LED never lights up

## groza

I have NF7-S board and a Hitachi SATA drive (Vancouver III 80G).

I know that the HDD LED is OK, it works fine with windows.

I think that it is annoying not to know when the disk is being used.

Any solutions?

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## malloc

If you've been toying around inside your box the most probable cause for this is that the hdd led wire might have been disconnected from the mobo. Try to look into it

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## groza

Nope, it's fine. I have dual boot, so all I need to verify that the LED is attached is to boot Windows.

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## FirechilD

hi,

i've excat the same problem

my board is an a7n8x-deluxe with the 2.6.5-rc3-love2 kernel

somebody knows something about this now?

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## sakus

Me three, I have Abit NF7-S and a Maxtor S-ATA disc. HDD led never lights up in Gentoo (2.6.5-gentoo-r1), and I also know it's not busted since it works when I boot to XP.

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## dj_rigo

maybe it's a bug in the hardware that has been fixed with the windows driver, i hope the sata_sil devs add the hdd led support (or maybe it is an specific nforce2 issue??)

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## phan

Hi,

Abit AN7 Sil3112 controller - Seagate SATA 80gb

No LED   :Rolling Eyes: 

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## kamikaze_gerbil

Same issue here. Since it works in Windows, it must be a driver issue with either the nvidia chipset or the Silicon Image chip. I'm not a programmer, but I did a little poking around and found this in ide-probe.h:

```
   /* enable led activity for disk drives only */

   if (drive->media == ide_disk && hwif->led_act)

      blk_queue_activity_fn(q, hwif->led_act, drive);
```

Perhaps the sata drive isn't being reported correctly as an ide_disk?

Anyone with hardware level programming experience?    :Very Happy: 

Does anyone have a sata and an ide drive being mounted at the same time? Does it light up when accessing the ide drive?

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## ibeleaf

Glad to see I'm not going crazy...  mine doesn't work in Gentoo either.

(EDIT:  I'm using an A7N8X Deluxe with a single Maxtor 120Gb SATA drive)Last edited by ibeleaf on Mon Aug 02, 2004 5:33 am; edited 2 times in total

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## gazoombo

Abit NF7-S, 2.6.7-gentoo-r10. Same problem, just never noticed it since my tower is under my desk. I use gkrellm to tell when my disk is being used. Wonder why the LED doesn't work..  :Confused: 

edit: I am not using SATA btw. Just a plain Maxtor IDE HDD

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## blaster999

I've never thought that LED is software-controlled. Does it work when you boot from livecd (cat /dev/hda >/dev/null to find out)?

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## dj_rigo

No, in fact, when booting into Windows, the led starts to work after a second of disk activity (I know that because my disk is noisy), I bet that it is software controlled...

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## Steven Robertson

Asus A7N266-E (nForce 1 chip).  Same problem, although it may be interesting to note that I'm not using SATA.  My mobo doesn't even support it, and support is compiled out of my kernel.  I don't think it's the LED cable lead, or the polarity, but I can't check ATM as my system is a multi-user box and I'm too lazy to run around the house booting my family off.

EDIT: I'm using nitro-sources-2.6.8-rc2-r3, with CONFIG_INPUT_PCSPKR (Device Drivers->Input Device Support->Misc->PC Speaker Support) compiled out.  Anyone here have it compiled in, and still causing failures?

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## wumpus

I have the same problem,

I used to have one IDE and one SATA so that I could notice that the LED worked well with the IDE one.

Now I took the IDE off and put a second SATA and the LED is dead !

(still working in windows - ASUS P4G8X Deluxe - Sillicon Image too)

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## gazoombo

Sorry to bump, but I'm curious if anyone ever found a solution to this problem. (or have newer kernels fixed anything?)

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## warthog

I'm using the a7n8x-deluxe (asus) w/an IDE HDD on 2.6.7-gentoo-r11, and my HDD LED works.  However, it didn't work for the longest time, and one day I switched the polarity of the LED wire connector on the motherboard and it has worked ever since.  I don't have windoze, so I can't comment on that.

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## dj_rigo

 *warthog wrote:*   

> I'm using the a7n8x-deluxe (asus) w/an IDE HDD on 2.6.7-gentoo-r11, and my HDD LED works.  However, it didn't work for the longest time, and one day I switched the polarity of the LED wire connector on the motherboard and it has worked ever since.  I don't have windoze, so I can't comment on that.

 ehm... it normally works with IDE drives, the problem is that the light doesn't work with the SATA ones.

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## irondog

When booting windows you can see activity AFTER the first part of the NT kernel is loaded. So when windows loads it's device driver the led activity begins, but not in the first few seconds. 

In DOS it doesn't work either. It must be programmed from the device driver.

View this pdf. It describes how the ide-led is implemented:

http://12.24.47.40/utility/getfile.asp?rid=1023

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## jub0r

There's closed-source drivers here

http://12.24.47.40/display/2n/kb/article.asp?aid=10468

Not for gentoo of course. Maybe someone can get them to work?

I'm going to give it a shot.

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## jub0r

if someone is braver than i, there's some libata-dev patches here

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/jgarzik/patchkits/2.6/

I read that it has

 *Quote:*   

>  per-port LED control for sata_vsc

 

whatever that means

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## LynZ

Same problem here.  Im my opinion it's the libata + sata_sil problem.

So in windows you just use the Sil Image drivers, in linux you don't ... 

I don't think tha my LED is so important =))) But i'd like it to work to.

But letting any close-source driver in for that seems a bit shitty for me.

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## noseh

I have a Intel 915G-chipset, and i have the opposite problem :\

The LED turns on at boot, and does not turn off, ever.

I know the LED works, since i've tested it with windoze

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## Gentree

This issue is ancient history now so I wondered if it ever got fixed. I just bought an AN7 and I am scouring the forums for likely issues and stuff I need to add to my kernel before switching mobos.

TIA.   :Cool: 

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