Installing Fedora Core 12 on a system with a IT8212 SATA Controller

[Alan Cox]

> > I have a machine whose only hard drive is a SATA 160GB (Western
> > Digital). The SATA controller is an ITE IT8212 (a raid controller, but
> > I'm not using that feature).

The IT8212 is a PATA controller not SATA. I guess they may have wired
SATA bridges to it.

> machine I had to get the driver from the mfg web page and compile it
> myself. But later (I think it was at the Centos/RHEL5 transition) I found
> that there was a working driver in the system. So, I'd expect that Fedora
> 12 would have it built in too.

It does. One thing worth noting is that the chip has two modes. In the
RAID mode it doesn't support CD-ROM devices but handles basic raid stuff
itself via its embedded microcontroller. In non-RAID mode it behaves
exactly like a standard IDE controller. Both modes are supported. RAID 0
is generally best done using software RAID in Linux, RAID 1 there are
advantages to doing it either way. Some of the RAID firmwares are a bit
flakey so if you get a problem boot it with the device in non-RAID mode.
(if the BIOS won't let you set it then try 'pata_it821x.noraid=1' as a
boot option.

Alan