[conspire] Problem accessing SATA controller

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mark S Bilk (mark at cosmicpenguin.com):

> I read that this SATA controller chip requires the scsi_mod, 
> libata, and sata_sil kernel modules.  After the system has 
> booted up and is running KDE, I inserted modules libata and 
> sata_sil using insmod, and verified their presence with lsmod.  
> scsi_mod was already present.  

You usually want to use modprobe rather than insmod, by the way.  It
takes care of module dependencies automatically, that way.  (modprobe is
a wrapper around insmod.)

> But cfdisk could not access /dev/sda or /dev/sdb, and Yast's 
> Hardware Information function could not find the drive either.

It's possible that looking at the end of /var/log/dmesg, around that
time, could be enlightening.  If you see nothing about a hard drive
there, then either it's a hardware problem (unlikely), or something like
your suspicion about a weird drive incompatibility might apply -- in
which case it'd be handy to borrow a second SATA drive and cross-check.

> Do disk controller modules have to be loaded during bootup to be
> effective, even if they are not needed for the boot drive?

No, they don't.

> Sorry for the newbie-ish question, but I have RTFM'ed, e.g.,
> http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html
> http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.add

Then you already have everything *I* had to offer on that subject, and a
bit more.  ;->  Sorry to hear about the problem.