AB9 Pro Motherboard SATA/AHCI installation problem

[Chris G]

On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 07:41:08PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> > thought this might be because the SATA interface needed to be switched
> > to AHCI mode but on doing this the disks are no longer visible at all at
> > boot time so the system refuses to even start booting.
> 
> AHCI is the best mode but you then need the AHCI drivers to be in the
> initrd for booting.
> > 
> > So I have set the SATA disks back to IDE mode, and noticed that my old
> > Slackware installation still boots (using the grub loader installed by
> > Fedora!).  Why does my Slackware still boot when Fedora can't seem to
> > see the disks at all?
> 
> What does slackware report the disk controller in question as ?

Well I'm still a bit confused but I have got things working again.

The AB9 Pro latest BIOS (version 21) doesn't seem to detect the SATA
disks  when you switch to AHCI so the disks "weren't there".  Going
back to the previous BIOS (version 20) ha fixed the problem.  I now
see the BIOS message about the Intel drivers for the SATA disks and
Fedora boots again without problems.

What I really don't understand is how Slackware continue to work
without the Intel drivers being there.

Moral of the story is - don't upgrade the BIOS unless you *know* it
fixes something!  :-)   I was just hoping it might address my
stability problem.  Anyway I have got the "latest but one" BIOS which
is a lot newer than the one that was there before.

-- 
Chris Green