# SATA detection

## alienjon

I currently have both XP and Gentoo on one hard drive installed  in the regular IDE fashion (the drive is plugged directly into my biostar motherboard (http://www.biostar.com.tw/products/mainboard/board.php?name=M7VIT%20Pro). I also have another hard drive that I use for storage. This one is plugged into a PCI SATA/150 card. Windows reads it with no problem but I would also like to use it for storage on Gentoo as well. When I run lspci I get:

```
0000:00:09.0 Unknown mass storage controller: Promise Technology, Inc. PDC20375 (SATA150 TX2plus) (rev 02)

```

From that it looks as if gentoo does not have the correct drivers installed to read the card (and therefore the drive) properly. What do I need to do to get it working?

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## lbrtuk

You probably need to compile sata_promise into your kernel. It's under Device Drivers -> SCSI device support -> SCSI low level drivers -> Serial ATA (SATA) support -> Promise SATA TX2/TX4 support.

Once compiled in, your drives should come up as scsi drives (sda, sdb etc.) at boot.

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## alienjon

should the system automatically detect the drives (and I'll have it available for use) after I set up the kernel, or do I have to initialize the device somewhere?

Also, how do I mount the hard drive once its detected?

(ex: mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom0)

would it be

(ex: mount /dev/sata /mnt/storage {or whatever directory I have setup})?

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## wmartino

If you have the correct kernel module installed it should see the drives all on its own. As far as mounting the drives. You would mount something similar to this:

```
mount  /dev/sda1 /mnt/whatever
```

Of course replace whatever with the mount directory. You can also put the information in your fstab to mount automaticly. One other thing, how is your sata drive formatted? If it is formatted as a fat32 you will need to make sure you have the fat32 module installed in your kernel.

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## alienjon

Oof... I'm pretty sure its NTFS, if not then where do I find the FAT32 support in the Kernel?

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## wmartino

If it is NTFS then you will not be able to use it with gentoo. If I remeber correctly linux can only write to an existing file without changing to file size. If it is a fat32 the kerenel support is in the Device Drivers --  File System section (I am not at my linux box right now to verify that). If you can't find it please post back and I will check my computer when I get home.

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## alienjon

Its definately NTFS, oh well...  :Confused: 

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## alienjon

As an update, I checked into my kernel, having touched upon the problem again, and found that there is indeed support for NTFS, and it is already built in (for write support, not debugging). I still don't have any detection, though.

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## lbrtuk

What's your actual problem? Is the kernel not detecting the sata controller? Is /dev/sda not showing up? Are you just having trouble mounting the partition?

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## alienjon

I ended up starting a new topic by accident, here's the link:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-312755-highlight-.html

I think it gives a bit more detail for an explanation than this set has. Sorry that it's broken up. :Confused: 

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## alienjon

Sorry, I also meant to check and see if /dev/sda is present or not, I'll post a reply once I get the chance to check it out (I'm at work right now)

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