Dell GX280 and SATA drives

  • Thread starter Thread starter Gerry Hickman
  • Start date Start date
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Gerry Hickman

Hi,

I looked into this in some detail. I was unable to find a "SATA" driver (as
such) on the Dell resource CD, but it appears the controller on Dell GX280s
are in-fact part of the Intel chipset. The driver would therefore reside in
the Intel Ich6 "chipset" driver.

That's fine, such a driver does exist and one would expect this to install
via the usual PnP mechanism.

However, this does NOT cover the issue of how the SATA controller can talk
to Windows text-mode setup, and I'm unable to find any TXTSETUP.OEM file,
nor am I able to find any sensible information on either the Dell or Intel
sites. Again, I can only imagine there's some kind of emulation going one...

Two other issues remain:

1. How to deal with machines that don't have floppies (not really a problem
in the case of Dell as it has emulation?).

2. How to deal with the recovery console (again, not really a problem on
Dell)

The potential problem is that you want to have a diagnostics CD and recovery
CD. In the past these would have worked fine on all client machines
regardless of make/model, but with this SATA nonsense, you'd need to ensure
all text-mode drivers are burried in any bootable media.

Gerry Hickman
SSRU SysAdmin
 
Hi,

I *think* I know how this works now, and it would also explain something
I mentioned in an earlier thread along the lines of seeing "two primary
IDE controllers?"

I think what's happening is this:

The Intel chipset has a SATA controller and an IDE controller, but
unlike the VIA RAID controller (and other 3rd party ones), the Intel
controller *appears* at the hardware level as an ordinary IDE controller.

That's why DOS and Windows can install without any special drivers and
it's also why you see "two IDE controllers" when not using Intel's driver.

Upon installing Intel's driver at the PnP level, the o/s suddenly starts
calling the controller a "SATA controller", but actually it's the same
controller that it used to be five minutes earlier but with a new fancy
name.

So the question is this:

Unlike SCSI, which uses the manufacturer driver During text-mode setup,
the Intel breed of SATA uses standard "IDE drivers" - probably the
Microsoft ones. Once the o/s is installed, the PnP driver is added but
what exactly does this achieve, other than changing the name of the
controller? My guess is that it replaces the call to disk.sys with calls
to Intel's driver and maybe this is optimized for the controller. Either
way, my guess is that the extra performance you get is close to zero
(I've used the machine both with and without it remember).

Originally, I thought this was some kind of "Dell trick", but maybe it
applies to all modern Intel chipsets with SATA...

The machine I built over Christmas (that went wrong) was not an Intel
chipset, it was VIA, and therefore is not the same. My mistake was
testing a build on an Intel system and assuming it would work on an AMD
system.
 
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