SPAM: Score 4.0: SATA disk experience

[Johnson David]

> From: Mike Jeays [mailto:Mike.Jeays at rogers.com]
> 
> I have just borrowed a brand new Pentium 4 3.6 GHz machine from the
> office, intending to use it as an open source demonstration machine.
> 
> To my surprise, it has no IDE disk, only a SATA drive, which 
> I have not used before personally.
> 
> Fedora Core 1 and Suse Enterprise Server completely failed to install,
> complaining about "no disk drive".
> 
> FreeBSD 5.3 installed perfectly, and runs like the wind!  
> Hats off again to the FreeBSD team.

Ditto on the experience. My SATA system is over a year old and FreeBSD
worked without a hitch on it since day one. My original plan was to put
Linux on a partition as a tertiary boot, but I soon gave up as I never could
find one that would install. When I googled for information on installing
Linux to SATA, most of the hints and instructions said to build a SATA
driver. But how do you build a driver before you install? Later someone told
me to turn on legacy mode in the BIOS, install, build the driver, and
finally turn off legacy, but that's twenty times the work necessary. Why go
through that hassle when FreeBSD works "out of the box"?

David