Craig Block wrote:

Hello,

I'm having a problem getting Linux to handle the SATA drives and controllers on
a new computer with an ASUS M2N-X motherboard.  This is a socket AM2 board and
has an nVidia nForce 520 chipset.  It has three controller mode settings in the
BIOS, SATA, AHCI, and RAID.

I built and tried a couple kernels, one with SATA_NV plus BLK_DEV_IDECD and the
other with SATA_AHCI plus PATA_AMD.

With the controllers in SATA mode, the kernel built with SATA_NV doesn't see
the SATA controllers at all.  The PATA CD drive links to hda and works
properly.  I tried the same kernel on an nForce 4 system and everything works
right.
 
With the controllers in AHCI mode, the kernel built with SATA_AHCI, hangs when
probing the SATA controllers.  It literally takes about a minute to get through
each one.  It never does link any drives to them.  The PATA CD drive links to
sr0 and seems to work okay.

I've had MS Windows working without issue in either mode, using the canned IDE
driver in SATA mode and the nVidia AHCI driver in AHCI mode.

Output from "dmesg" and "lspci -n -vvv" commands is attached.

Does 'noapic' kernel parameter help?

-- 
tejun