[tlug] grub/possible sata issue

["Conor McTernan" <conormcternan@example.com>]

I was wondering if anyone has experienced much pain with SATA drives under Linux? 

I'm currently trying to rebuild a server to act as a backup machine. It's a SuperMicro motherboard with an Opteron CPU. 

I'm trying to put 2 Seagate SATA drives into the machine and reinstall the OS (SME Server 7.2, which is essentially Centos 4.4). The install will go fine, but when it reboots after install it will completely hang The BIOS will initialize but once it gets to GRUB it hangs. Sometimes it will hang indefinitely others it will display 'GRUB HARD DRIVE ERROR' and then hang. 

I have not had much luck asking google about this and was hoping someone might have had a similar experience (and gotten around it). 

Some interesting points though, the disks that I previously had in the machine were SATA so they should be working. I also currently have a machine in production running SME 
7.1 on the exact same (hardware except for the hard disks). I've checked all the settings in the BIOS for SATA and they seem to be ok. It offers me 3 options for SATA, I can choose RAID, IDE or MIMO, the machine that is in production is set to MIMO so I've set this to the same 

I'm trying to re-install the OS for about the 6th time now, but using only 1 hdd, hoping that this might finally get me booting into an OS. 

Anway, I'd really appreciate any pointers on this, I'm almost at my wits end. 

Cheers, 

Conor