February 2005 Archives

This document briefly explains, on configuring SATA (SiS 180) drive on an ASUS K85 MX motherboard

The following is the hardware setup:
1. AMD 2800+ 64 Bit
2. ASUS K8S MX mobo (with on-board SiS 180 SATA Controller)
3. 160 GB Seagate SATA drive (this was partitioned by my windows XP as NTFS)
4. OS (Fedora Core 3) installed on a 80 GB IDE HDD (/dev/hda).

The Process:
Note: the 2.6.9 kernel which ships with fedora core 3 does not have the S-ATA patch to work with the Sis driver. So, we upgrade the kernel.

1. Update the kernel (I used the SMP version) from Fedora Updates. Install using rpm -ivh kernel-smp-2.6.10-1.766_FC3.x86_64.rpm

2. Install NTFS drivers for this kernel from the Sourceforge NTFS project page.. Enable NTFS support by loading the kernel module using /sbin/modprobe ntfs. You can see if NTFS is enabled by running cat /proc/filesystem. You should be seeing an entry for NTFS in it.

3. Now, download the kernel source. Fedora no longer ships with the kernel-source RPM. You must install it separately. * Download the kernel source from Fedora Updates.

* Install this using rpm -ivh kernel-2.6.10-1.766_FC3.src.rpm.

* Set it up using rpmbuild -bp --target=noarch /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/kernel-2.6.spec.
The source files will be properly located in '/usr/src/redhat/BUILD/kernel-2.6.10'.

* create a symlink to the source: ln -s /usr/src/redhat/BUILD/kernel-2.6.10/linux-2.6.10 /usr/src/linux-2.6.10-1.766_FC3smp

4. Download the SiS 180 SATA driver from SiS Driver Download Page

# tar -zxvf sis18x_2.6.10_1.00.00.tgz
# cd cd sis18x_2.6.10_1.00.00
# make
# make install
# modprobe sata_sis

* Run fdisk /dev/sda to check the partition.

5. You can mount mount the disk using mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /data/