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

[Iain Davis]

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 12:06 PM, Alan Cox <alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:
>> > 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.

I should have clued in when you said this, but I didn't until I was
messing about in the case (prompted by Roger's comments about drive
searching):

The drive is NOT SATA. I relied on my memory of what I had done to the
hardware a couple of years back...and was completely wrong. I thought
I had put in a SATA drive & controller, but in fact it was this IT8212
PATA controller and the Western Digital WD1600JB (Caviar). A EIDE
drive. I guess I merely dreamed that it was a SATA controller/drive.
:)

So I mis-represented my problem in that respect, my apologies!

So far, I've not resolved the problem, though. I've so far tried
Alan's two suggestions and Roger's:

* I made sure the controller was in IDE mode (I _believe_ it was
before, but the controller's bios seems to default to RAID 0, rather
than what you had set the mode to, so I can't be sure)
* I tried the 'pata_it821x.noraid=1' boot option.
* Disabling any drives besides the DVD-ROM and the Caviar HDD. (Which
the only thing left was the floppy drive).

I'm going more closely examine how I have the hardware put together,
perhaps something will jump out at me.

Oh! One other thing I tried. I had a copy of Slackware 12.x laying
around, and experimentally booted up with slackware and took a look
with cfdisk, and I could see the drive. What I take from that is that
something about my hardware and the Fedora installer isn't playing
nice together and I just have to track down what...

Thanks again to the three of you (Fred, Alan and Roger) for your help.

Iain