generic HW question about SATA

[James Wilkinson]

Anne Wilson wrote:
> OK - trying to get my head around this.  So I'd need to prepare the disk(s) 
> using fdisk, after which kudzu would detect them and load the relevant 
> module, just leaving the creation of mount points to do?  I want to use them 
> for long-term storage.

Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> Kudzu should find the disk when you add it.

I'm not sure that it is kudzu these days -- as I understand it, the
hotplug system should detect it on boot, and udev should add a /dev/sda
device node.

As for the SATA drivers, they're probably loaded anyway. They are on my
nForce 4 system with only traditional IDE devices¹:
$ /sbin/lsmod | grep sata
sata_nv                22341  0 
libata                126697  1 sata_nv

> You can not run fdisk on
> the disk(s) if the SATA module does not get loaded. I am not sure
> what happens when you reboot after partitioning the disks - it would
> be interesting to see if the partitions would get auto-mounted off
> of /media if you do not have entries for them in fstab.

I would think that highly unlikely, because the disks would not have
filesystems on them. Anne would have to mke2fs new filesystems before
they could be mounted.

What I'm not sure about is whether suitable device nodes will be created
when Anne either creates new partitions or a new logical volume (e.g.
/dev/sda1, if she creates one large traditional partition). I don't know
if there's any way to get the system to rescan the disk short of
rebooting.

In any case, my experience is that FC6 won't auto-mount partitions on
non-removable media. I seem to remember there being issues with Fedora
kernels using new ext3 features which older e2fsck programs can't
handle. That's a bit of a problem if the filesystem in question is the
root filesystem of the "main" Linux distribution on a computer, and
that distro is an older one with an old e2fsck -- the older distribution
then can't check its filesystems on boot-up.

James.

¹ Because I already had them from an older system...
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