Mini VFS SATA HOWTO

[storkus at storkus.com]

I finally figured out the problem I was having with my laptop not
wanting to boot off the hard drive.  Since I've seen this so much
online but rarely answers, I thought I would post this as a sort of
mini-howto on linuxquestions.com (and maybe others), but I wanted to
run it by you guys first.

What I discovered was the following:

1. For most recent PC's you want to use the AHCI driver.  AHCI is a
new, open standard for SATA that nearly everyone is following and so
it should be the driver tried first.  I was using the NForce driver
since that's what I have as a northbridge, but apparently that just
for older hardware.  In any case, it would be nice for the kernel
people to leave a note to that effect in the kernel help.

2. SCSI disk support *MUST* still be turned on with any SATA interface.
Again, why it's not set to do so automatically I don't know.

With these 2 on together, it boots fine.  Also, for anyone with a
Wistron
laptop (most Acer and Fujitsu, some others), check out the "acer-wmi"
driver in 2.6.25+.  It makes the buttons work and ACPI weirdness go
away.

Thanks for any and all input!

Mike

Off to Saboten-Con!  Woohoo! :)

Composed on webmail using Lynx, so any format errors...oh well.