To boot my linux, I faced a JMicron eSata/Pata controller problem, that prevented my SATA disk from being recognized. => I had to use a 2.6.23 kernel, founded on the gentoo forum. (the knoppix latest released I used were 2.6.19 !!!) Do you also have a JMicron controller ?
> Is there any other solution for this or is the only Linux support > going to require AHCI? It is unfortunately not reasonable or practical > to switch BIOS options when choosing which OS to boot. <snip> Of course it is not. You will be able to run linux without any problem with a recent kernel and all the required modules without AHCI. But you may be able to run AHCI in both linux and windows too. Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Host_Controller_Interface Quotes for Windows issue: "Enabling AHCI in a system BIOS will cause a 0x7B Blue Screen of Death STOP error (INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE) on installations of Windows XP where AHCI/RAID drivers for that system's chipset are not installed. Switching to AHCI mode requires installing new drivers before changing the BIOS settings." and for linux side: "AHCI is fully supported out of the box for Microsoft Windows Vista and the Linux operating system from kernel 2.6.19. Older operating systems require drivers written by the host bus adapter vendor in order to support AHCI." Common problems switching to AHCI under Linux: * AHCI controller does not work on AMD/ATI RS400-200 and RS480 HBA when MSI is enabled due to a hardware error. In order for AHCI to work users must provide the "pci=nomsi" kernel boot parameter. With MSI disabled in this way, the PCIe bus can only act as a faster PCI bus with hotplug capabilities. This is also true of the Nvidia nForce 560 chipset. * AHCI controller on AMD/ATI SB600 HBA can't do 64bit DMA transfers. 64-bit addressing is optional in AHCI 1.1 and the chip claims it can do them, but in reality it can't, so it is disabled. After that it will be forced to do 32bit DMA transfers. Thus DMA transfers will occur at the lower 4GB region of the memory, and bounce buffers must be used sometimes if there is more than 4GB of RAM." Gal' -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
