Q:

How to enable SATA in Centos 5?

I have a centos 5 linux box which is currently running off an IDE drive. I want to install a couple of SATA drives as backup drives for now. I have googled that there can be complications with SATA and might need to re-install centos.
Is there a way to 'enable' SATA support in Centos 5 without needing to re-install it?
Is there a way to check to see if this support is already available in the current install?
The drives are on there way, so I can't just plug'n'play.

A:

I'm assuming you have SATA support on your motherboard. Is there anything presently using the SATA interface? CD/DVD drive, perhaps?
Try a dmesg | grep -i sata and see what's returned. On a nearby desktop PC running CentOS, I tried and received the following output:
[root@bootylicious03 ~]# dmesg | grep -i sata
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xcf204000 port 0xcf204100 irq 58
ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xcf204000 port 0xcf204180 irq 58
ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xcf204000 port 0xcf204200 irq 58
ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xcf204000 port 0xcf204280 irq 58
ata5: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xcf204000 port 0xcf204300 irq 58
ata6: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xcf204000 port 0xcf204380 irq 58
ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
ata2: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
ata3: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
ata4: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
ata5: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
ata6: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)

SATA is addressed by the libata kernel module in CentOS, and that may already be loaded in your existing setup (check with lsmod). I don't think you'll need to reinstall anything for this. If the drives are already physically connected and powered on, did you look for the additional devices in dmesg or with fdisk -l?

