November 29, 2009

Ubuntu and VIA VT6421 PCI SATA Howto

 
I have seen question of how to make VIA VT6421 PCI SATA card work under Ubuntu on number of forum posts and only solutions I have seen on Ubuntu forum was: "Solved:: Installed Windows. Got data no problems." :(
 
This obviously is not the solution. I found a solution that works on Ubuntu 8.10 but probably will work on any other Ubuntu version.
 
So in order to make this device work you need to see what module it uses:
 
lspci -k|grep -i VT6421 -A 2
 
01:07.0 RAID bus controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6421 IDE RAID Controller (rev 50)
Kernel driver in use: sata_via
Kernel modules: sata_via

 
So we can see that the module this card uses is called "sata_via", now just load the module for this VIA card and of you go:
 
sudo modprobe sata_via