Problems Installing to PowerEdge 850 with SATA Drive

[Doug Ambrisko]

ambrisko writes:
| Lynn A. Roth writes:
| | I have two new Dell Poweredge 850 machines.  They have an Intel ICH7 
| | chipset.  When I boot FreeBSD 6 RC1, the controller is identified, but 
| | any drives connected to the SATA ports are not detected.  The drive that 
| | is included with the system is a Seagate 7200.7 drive.  I also tried a 
| | Maxtor.
| 
| I can confirm the problem on the PE850.  I have it working with my
| latest 4.X SATA patches (which I haven't published yet).  I might
| be able to look into this.
| 
| FWIW, I my code these SATA registers in 4.X before the become alive:
|    ata2: Intel SATA P0 status 0 error 4050000 scontrol 0 0 1
|    ata2: Intel SATA P0 status 113 error 4050000 scontrol 0 0 1
|    ata2: Intel SATA P0 status 113 error 0 scontrol 0 0 1
|    ata3: Intel SATA P1 status 0 error 4050000 scontrol 0 1 1
|    ata3: Intel SATA P1 status 113 error 4050000 scontrol 0 1 1
|    ata3: Intel SATA P1 status 113 error 0 scontrol 0 1 1
| On other Intel controllers they I don't have to acknowledge the 
| errors off the bat.

This is sort-of the clue indirectly.  The issue is that the ICH7 and
maybe ICH6 have a hybrid AHCI mode in which the SATA status, error, control
registers are present in AHCI for compatibility but that's all.  The
reset of the AHCI registers are not there so then you have to 
wack the registers in PCI space 0x92 to reset the controller.  Doing
an AHCI reset won't work since it isn't running full AHCI mode.

I don't have a fix but this is the problem that I see.  If we don't
do the channel reset via PCI space then it can never get out of that
state so no drives are found.

Doug A.