2nd SATA PCI card causing mischief

[Colin Brace]

Hi all,

As I mentioned in a post last week
<http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2006-July/msg02020.html>
I've been trying without success to add an additional SATA drive to my
FC5 system, but I have narrowed the problem down somewhat.

To recap, I already have five drives in the system: one ATA, two SATAs
attached to the SATA interface of the MB, and two SATAs attached to a
SATA PCI card.

To accomated a fifth SATA drive, I added a second SATA card of the
same brand (Sweex). Although it is a newer model with RAID features,
it has, as far as I can tell, the same chipset, SiI 3112. Here is the
lscpi ouput

02:0c.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3112
[SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02)
02:0d.0 Mass storage controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3112
[SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02)

(the newer one is the first).

Booting the system with the new drive connected to the new SATA card,
the drive is not recognized; according to dmesg, the kernel doesn't
give it a device name.

Booting the system, however, with the new drive connected to SATA on
the MB, the drive is recognized and I can format and mount it.
However, the drive which was previously connected to the MB SATA and
which I connected to the new SATA card, is no now longer recognized.

Further, at the start of the boot process, an error message is displayed twice:

  ata2 failed to respond (30 seconds).

In /var/log/messages, I see a bit more:

[...]
Jul 18 01:03:02 ariel kernel: ata1: SATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0xF8832480
ctl 0xF883248A bmdma 0xF8832400 irq 177
Jul 18 01:03:02 ariel kernel: ata2: SATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0xF88324C0
ctl 0xF88324CA bmdma 0xF8832408 irq 177
Jul 18 01:03:02 ariel kernel: ata1: SATA link down (SStatus 0)
Jul 18 01:03:02 ariel kernel: scsi0 : sata_sil
Jul 18 01:03:02 ariel kernel: input: ImExPS/2 Logitech Explorer Mouse
as /class/input/input1
Jul 18 01:03:02 ariel kernel: ata2 is slow to respond, please be patient
Jul 18 01:03:02 ariel kernel: ata2 failed to respond (30 secs)
Jul 18 01:03:02 ariel kernel: ata2 is slow to respond, please be patient
Jul 18 01:03:03 ariel kernel: ata2 failed to respond (30 secs)
Jul 18 01:03:03 ariel kernel: ata2: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113)
[...]

but I am afraid I don't know how to interpret what is going on. What
is precisely is ata2? And is this related to the failure to disks
attached to the 2nd SATA card to be seen by the kernel?

Clearly, there is some kind of conflict going on with the 2nd SATA
card. But what exactly?

Thanks for any ideas...

-- 
  Colin Brace
  Amsterdam