sata trouble

[albi at scii.nl]

On Fri, 26 Aug 2005 20:16:55 +0200
Armin Pirkovitsch <a.pirko at inode.at> wrote:

>   I wonder whether anyone here can help me with a little problem:
> I just bought a notebook with a VIA VT 6421 sata controller and a 
> Samsung HM080JI sata harddisk.
> The controller is recognized with 6.0 B3 but it can't identify the 
> harddisk - i get the following error:
> 
> unknown: timeout waiting to issue command
> unknown: error issueing ATA_IDENTIFY command
> unknown: timeout waiting to issue command
> unknown: error issueing ATA_IDENTIFY command

not really an answer to your question, but.. i'm using 6.0-BETA3 here
with basically the same controller and a SATA maxtor disc (and 1
IDE-disc + 2 dvd-drives) without problems :

pciconf -lv|grep SATA
    device   = 'VT8237  VT6410 SATA RAID Controller'

$ dmesg |grep ad6
ad6: 190782MB <Maxtor 6B200M0 BANC1980> at ata3-master SATA150

are there possible BIOS-options for the SATA on your machine ?