Motherboard ASUS P5Q Deluxe

Problems with Mandriva Linux 2009.0 and PATA devices
The P5Q-Deluxe motherboard (or in general any P5Q-* motherboard) has 3 SATA controllers:

1. The Intel ICH10R: supports the 6 SATA ports on the motherboard and it is handled by the 'ahci' kernel module
   
2. The Marvell 88SE6121: handles 1 e-SATA port and 1 IDE port.
   
3. The Silicon Image Sil5723: handles two other SATA ports in "Drive Xpert mode"

According to what reported in bug #43975 and cooker ML, the 'pata_marvell' kernel module handles the single IDE port on the motherboard, to which you can attach TWO IDE devices (master and slave, e.g. an IDE DVD and a PATA hard-disk, etc.). In 2009.0 this module is not added/recognized by default, so should be added manually, following one of these steps:

1. Edit /etc/modprobe.conf and add the block /sbin/modprobe pata_marvell, so that at the end the line looks like:
   
   install scsi_hostadapter /sbin/modprobe ahci; /sbin/modprobe ata_piix; /sbin/modprobe pata_marvell; /bin/true
   
   Then rebuild the initrd image using:
   
   mkinitrd -f /boot/initrd-`uname -r`.img `uname -r`
   
   In this way the pata_marvell kernel module will be added to the initrd booting image.
2. Alternatively edit the file /etc/modprobe.preload.d/pata_marvell and add a line containing pata_marvell. This won't require to regenerate the initrd image.

The 'ahci' kernel module can handle, if passing the kernel option ahci.marvell_enable=1 (into the grub menu.lst file) the e-SATA port attached to the Marvell controller, but if doing so, the PATA port will be unaccessible to the system: this was verified attaching a SATA disk to the e-SATA port: under these conditions the SATA disk is recognized and works, but an ATAPI DVD recorder become inaccessible by the (any) driver. Viceversa, not passing any extra argument to the 'ahci' module and loading the pata_marvell kernel module, will result in having the SATA disk connected to the e-SATA port not working correctly, but giving this error when accessing to it:

Mar  1 13:51:31 localhost kernel: ata8.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
Mar  1 13:51:31 localhost kernel: ata8.01: cmd c8/00:20:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/f0 tag 0 dma 16384 in
Mar  1 13:51:31 localhost kernel:          res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
Mar  1 13:51:31 localhost kernel: ata8.01: status: { DRDY }
Mar  1 13:51:36 localhost kernel: ata8: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
Mar  1 13:51:41 localhost kernel: ata8: device not ready (errno=-16), forcing hardreset
Mar  1 13:51:41 localhost kernel: ata8: soft resetting link
Mar  1 13:51:47 localhost kernel: ata8: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)

Other source of informations

• Latest BIOS: 1805 (24 Feb 2009)
• Output of lspcidrake
• Output of hdparm -tT /dev/sda (DDR2-800 memory and Western Digital WD3200AAJS disk).