Mandrake 10 and SATA

[quadophile]

I have been reading posts about dual booting on various forums and looks like many people are having problems with dual booting Windows XP and Mandrake 10. I was experimenting with Mandrake 10 since last few days on a secondary system since I wanted to get a feel of how things work. I never had any problems installing Mandrake hardware wise or software wise on an exclusive machine but ideally wanted to install it on my main rig with Windows XP already installed to reduce the clutter of having two machines and investing in a KVM switch and catering to additional power requirements of two units.

 

Yesterday I planned to dual boot on my main rig without having to disturb the Windows XP installation with SP2 installed and everything worked out well and no hardware or software problems cropped up. The procedure I adopted was to keep the main boot drive WD with Windows XP untouched. I changed the settings in the bios to boot from the DVD drive and having the WD disabled for booting. I then proceeded to enable boot from SATA and installed the Mandrake 10. I forced Mandrake to create the boot loader on the SATA drive instead of the WD to make sure the Windows XP partition is not disturbed. Once all was installed and system rebooted I could see the boot menu indicating Linux as well as Windows. I could boot into Linux and also into Windows without any problems. When I switch the Bios to read the WD as boot drive, Linux is not recognised by Windows XP as the boot loader does not exist there. However, switching back to SATA as boot drive I can get all the options. I think I will leave it as it is and continue to experiment with the two OS and improve my skills on Linux.

 

My main rig specs and all the attached hardware are as follows:

 

P4 2.53 Ghz

Intel D845PEBT2 Motherboard

Corsair 512 MB XMS Low Latency PC2700 (2-2-2-5) DDR Ram

WD 80GB HD with 8MB cache (Primary Master)

Seagate 120 GB SATA

LaCie Dual Format 8X DVD Writer (Secondary Master)

Asus 16x DVD Rom (attached to Ultra ATA Controller due to this drive being ATA 100)

Promise Ultra ATA 100 Controller

Audigy sound card

Matrox G400 Dual Head VGA (retained from previous system)

US Robotics V90 56k Internal Voice/Fax/Data Modem (not compatible with Linux since it is a Winmodem essentially)

Logitech Elite Wireless Keyboard

Logitech MX 700 Wireless Mouse

Philips 170S5FB 17” LCD monitor

HP Scanner and Printer

Denco D719 case

 

Looks like I am hooked to Linux! B)

[AussieJohn]

Very nice one quadophile. Congratulations on your success and many many thanks for sharing with us as to how you did it. I have taken note I assure you.

 

About the KVM switch.........You can get an auto dual port (i.e. 2 computer boxes) KVM switch from LASER withbuilt in twin output cable sets for around Aus$35/40 ( much less in the US and about equivalent in UK. I got one and it is a godsend. I have Windows 2000Pro on a small 2nd class setup using all components from upgrading my main computer. And I use it for only occassional Windows-only type of applications. So really I no longer have to dual boot if I don't want to. It also spends most of its time switched off.

 

For such a small cost I think you would find it very handy. There are a couple of other makes that are similar, about the same price and also have the cables included. Forget about the flashier more expensive ones because the often don't include cables and they do not do anything more for you than the cheaper ones do.

I recommend it to you.

 

Cheers and again, thanks. John.

Edited September 17, 2004 by AussieJohn

[aus9]

quadophile

 

If you get a chance I am getting the same SATA, can you advise which kernel you opted for and have you had a chance to run hdparm and see what your reads are like

 

 

Thanks for any time you spend answering my queries

[quadophile]

can you advise which kernel you opted for and have you had a chance to run hdparm and see what your reads are like

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I am working off my laptop at the moment but off the top of my head I remember the kernel was 2.6.x (will check exactly if you like, later) I use the KDE 3.2 if I remember it correctly.

 

I have not had a chance to run hdpram but the drive is fairly fast and gives good performance and very silent, if this helps.

[quadophile]

Very nice one quadophile.  Congratulations on your success and many many thanks for sharing with us as to how you did it.  I have taken note I assure you. 

 

John.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

John I am terribly sorry for having missed out on your great response. I appreciate coming from a veteran like you.

 

for all the nice things you had to say about my effort

[AussieJohn]

Thank YOU quadophile.

I haven't tried your idea yet, but I will.

Cheers mate. John.

[aus9]

hmm, yes I thought it may be a 2.6 series but in browsing the cd media kernel packages they don't list one called 'sata' so will take pot luck when I get my greedy hands on my precious....heh heh

 

if it works (i expect pc to be available in 2 weeks) I will post my specs

[adamw]

There's no special SATA kernel, SATA will work on any of the kernels MDK ships (and I just noticed recently it sure ships a heck of a *lot* these days :>).

[hanez]

10.1 had MAJOR problems with my SATA drive, like readign at a quarter speed that mdk10 did...

 

Just so you know

[quadophile]

10.1 had MAJOR problems with my SATA drive, like readign at a quarter speed that mdk10 did...

 

Just so you know

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I have yet to find anything wrong with my installation and use of SATA. Anyone else have any problems? It would be good if folks could share their experience here.

 

Thanks to all who posted

[aus9]

have just got my seagate 80 G SATA and hdparm does not give a lot of info, errors for me on I, i & m but hdparm -c3d1u1X67 /dev/sda and hdparm -Tt /dev/sda gave me the best of the lowest

1030/280 averaged over 3 runs.

this was with mdk 10.1 CE std kernel and kde running and cups running etc....ie I did not kill any process so its more real than going into non-gui mode

 

2) c3d1u1 gave the biggest increases from my default of 1045/58 yes I know the higher number has dropped.

 

3) I still have not got my mobo to treat my sata as a NON-RAIDED and am unable at this early stage to get it to act like a normal drive. Time will tell.

 

4) without tweaking the knoppix 3.6 cd using kernel 2.4 partimage said it wrote at 454 M/sec a time of 3 min 20 sec for 1.47 G of data for my main partition.

 

I am going to do a rebuild as my 1 G of ram has left my 2 swaps untouched so will grab some.

Yes I don t mind rebuilding. the images will work as my partitions will become larger, heh heh

[adamw]

I have a WD 80GB SATA drive on an nforce2 motherboard using Silicon Image ATA controller and it works very well, performance is excellent. I've tried to help hanez with his problem and it looks like he really does have some kind of deep-down hardware/kernel problem, unfortunately :(. But for a lot of setups, it really works great.

[DarkFoss]

Being new to Linux I've found this to be an interesting thread. I had many problems with setting up Mandrake 10. I'm happy to report that 10.1 was such an easy install that I set-up a duel boot with no issues at all. My harddrives are both on the Sil sata controllers on my Abit NF7-sUltra 400 rev 2 with the latest 26 bios. My partitions are as follows: on my Maxtor sata drive 120g, sda windows xp pro 10g, programs games107g both ntfs, 3g fat 32 to share files between windows and Linux. Sdb 60g Maxtor on a sata converter partitions are 3g fat32 swap for windows, 30g for Mandrake default partitioning scheme, 27g ntfs for my Ghost images. During the final part of the installation where you can configure things I chose Grub instead of Lilo and installed it in the windows boot section of sda, and had no problems chooseing either os even though Mandrake's installed on sdb. I didn't know about the hd parm command here's what the output is.. I don't know if it's good or bad :P

 

/dev/sda:

Timing buffer-cache reads: 2052 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1025.64 MB/sec

BLKFLSBUF failed: Operation not supported

HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Operation not supported

Timing buffered disk reads: 170 MB in 3.00 seconds = 56.64 MB/sec

BLKFLSBUF failed: Operation not supported

HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Operation not supported

[root@Tardis-1 darkfoss]# hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb

 

/dev/sdb:

Timing buffer-cache reads: 2164 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1081.08 MB/sec

BLKFLSBUF failed: Operation not supported

HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Operation not supported

Timing buffered disk reads: 136 MB in 3.01 seconds = 45.14 MB/sec

BLKFLSBUF failed: Operation not supported

HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Operation not supported

 

Sorry if some of that wasn't needed but I didn't know what to cut out. Just wanted to share my experience here as well. Opps edit I just wanted to add I chose the 2.6 kernel during installation.

Edited December 4, 2004 by DarkFoss

[adamw]

They're fine results. Looks like you have some nice speedy RAM :)

[AussieJohn]

Seems my system is reasonably speedy as well and it is not using SATA

at all. Both Hard drives are WD 80gb 8mb cache 7200rpm

/dev/hda:

Timing buffer-cache reads: 1960 MB in 2.00 seconds = 979.66 MB/sec

Timing buffered disk reads: 138 MB in 3.02 seconds = 45.70 MB/sec

 

/dev/hdc:

Timing buffer-cache reads: 1836 MB in 2.00 seconds = 917.68 MB/sec

Timing buffered disk reads: 138 MB in 3.04 seconds = 45.46 MB/sec

 

I presume that hda is faster in this case because it is passive since my Mandrake is on /dev/hdc and hda is in this condition only used to get me in to Windows.

 

I am pleased with that.

 

 

Cheers. John.