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How to configure a hard disk

ST devices have on-chip support for Ultra DMA IDE disks. U-DMA4 support has been certified on some disks manufactured by:

  • Maxtor®
  • SeaGate®
  • Western Digital®

IDE support is configured by default in the Linux kernels. This does not include the ST IDE Interface which must still be configured as follows.

  1. Select ATA/IDE support (CONFIG_IDE) and make it active, in the section:

    2. Device Drivers ---> ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support --->
    ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support

  2. Make active Include IDE/ATA-2 DISK support (CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEDISK), in the section:

    3. Device Drivers ---> ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support ---> Include IDE/ATA-2 DISK support

  3. Make active the PIO DMA support:

    4. Device Drivers ---> ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support --->PIO DMA support

  4. Finally, when booting the kernel, add the following parameter in the command line to inform the driver to enable data transfer in Ultra DMA: 

    5. ... ide0=dma ...

    PIO mode will be used otherwise.

If a Linux kernel configured with IDE support is booted on a board without a disk attached, it may experience a long boot time while the software driver probes for non-existent devices. This can be avoided without re-configuring the kernel by changing the ide0 argument: 

... ide0=noprobe ...

Note: Actions such as enabling and disabling Ultra DMA mode, and putting the disk drive in standby mode (which lowers noise), can also be done on a running system using the hdparm utility.

  • To enable support for the on-chip SATA controller on some STMicroelectronics embedded processors:

    • Device Drivers --->Serial ATA (prod) and Parallel ATA (experimental) drivers --->STMicroelectronics SATA support

  • To enable support for generic directly connected ATA devices:

    • Device Drivers --->Serial ATA (prod) and Parallel ATA (experimental) drivers --->Generic platform device PATA support