S5500HCV, eSATA, and RHEL 4.8

[idata]

Hi, My system is an Intel S5500HCV mother board running RedHat Enterprise 4.8 with all the latest patches. I have several questions.

Does any one have any idea if the onboard SATA connectors on the Intel S5500HCV motherboard will support eSATA connections?

Does RHEL 5.4 have better support for eSATA?

When I configure the onboard SATA controller in AHCI mode the kernel panics on boot, Enhanced and Compatibility modes boot fine. Is there anything I can do to correct this?

Thank you for your help. Mike

[Daniel_O_Intel]

The chipset datasheet doesn't show eSATA support, but I don't know where else to look

http://www.intel.com/Products/Server/Chipsets/5500-5520/5500-5520-technicaldocuments.htm

Doing a Google search mostly shows eSATA on the desktop boards or the X58 workstation chipse

[Edward_Z_Intel]

I might be wrong but I don't think S5500HCV has eSATA support.

Did you change the SATA controller to AHCI mode after OS installation? If so you may get error because AHCI mode needs a different driver. Did you try to install OS after configuring AHCI mode?

[idata]

From my reading I quess that the board does not support eSATA. I have not tried installing in AHCI mode. I will try that when I upgrade to RHEL 5.x in May. Thanks you fory help.