Andi Kleen wrote:
It seems that SuSE 9.2 has a few issues regarding SATA controllers !!
Support for many SATA controllers is still somewhat bleeding edge because the drivers tend to be still in development and the chip vendors still often release new chips with different quirks. Not everything was supported well in 2.6.8. If you want you can try a newer KOTD kernel from ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/kernel/kotd/x86_64/ which is based on newer mainline with newer drivers (but no guarantee that it works at all, e.g. similar as in gentoo)
I have a system that uses the ata_piix driver. with SuSE 9.1 it will actually detect and run on this system fine, with the SuSE 9.2 install CD it doesn't even see the drive. when i custom compile the SuSE kernel it will see the drive but it has some issues reading the ext3 journal so it comes up in read only mode... i haven't had time to compare the differences in the driver, but it does seem that some vanilla kernel sources work (sorry don't know which ones because i didn't test that part). so it seems that there are some regressions in SuSE's SATA support for me. peter