installing to external disk: esata now!

[Paul Johnson]

On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 3:37 PM, Don Quixote de la Mancha
<quixote at dulcineatech.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> If one of you knows the similar recipe for esata, I would very much
>> appreciate it.
>
> You'll need a driver for the SATA controller that is built into your
> PC.

I think Don is not quite right here.  From what I can tell, the sata
drivers are loaded and present and they also make the external thing
work, it is the same stack.

I have installed Fedora 12 to an external SATA device with no trouble.
It works just like installing to an external USB.  That proves the
"principle" is good, and I just need to figure out if there is a way
to figure out what their magic is and apply it in Centos.

I am starting to think the problems I'm having with Centos are due to
the somewhat-well-known problem with support for sata drives in the
old kernels.  In the 2.6.18 era, there were plenty of reports about
sata drivers not being loaded early enough in the boot process.  The
symptom was that Fedora-7 or 8 would install on sata drives, but if
there were several drives in the system, somehow one or more would not
get recognized.  This is at the level of technical detail where I just
have to trust the experts in the linux kernel mailing list.  From what
I can tell it was apparently addressed in the 2.6.26 era.  It could be
I have some completely separate problem.

I have not tried to update a kernel on a Centos system to use a
Fedora-12 generation kernel.  The whole point of using Centos is
"stability", after all.  But I'm temped to try.

PJ
-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas