Swich SATA-controller from AHCI-mode to IDE-compatible ?

[continuum]

It looks like
sata0.virtualDev = "ahci"
is the silent default for SATA-controllers.

I want to test the SATA-controller in 2003 VMs and so far I have found no information about the driver that is required.
As plan B I tried to set the contoller into an IDE-compatible mode ( that hopefully  is implemented ??? ) but had no luck so far.

Does anybody know more ? - the WS documentation almost says nothing about the new feature

[dariusd]

Hey continuum!

Our SATA controller is a (hopefully) standards-compliant AHCI controller, so any "generic" AHCI driver should do.  I don't know if such a driver exists for WS2003, though.

We don't implement IDE compatibility mode.  I don't think we saw any benefit in implementing it, and it would bring a lot of additional and unwelcome complexity.  I believe our PIIX4 IDE ports have the same capabilities as would be exposed through a SATA controller in IDE compatibility mode anyway.  Please let us know if you understood or expected differently.  :smileygrin:

Cheers,

--

Darius

[continuum]

> I believe our PIIX4 IDE ports have the same capabilities as would be exposed through a SATA controller in IDE compatibility mode anyway.

hehe - 4 possible IDE disks or 120 possible SATA disks is a big difference

Actually I only missed one thing: I had expected to find a driver included in the vmware-tools.
I did not found one so I started to look for any documentation - but found nothing at all !

[WoodyZ]

continuum wrote: I did not found one so I started to look for any documentation - but found nothing at all !

Only certain OSes that contain in box drivers for AHCI/SATA will be able to access the VMware Virtual SATADrive ATA Device.

[dariusd]

I should have said: Each of our PIIX4 IDE ports has the same capabilities as would be exposed through each of the ports on a SATA controller in IDE compatibility mode.  :smileylaugh:

Although I would think that a SATA controller in IDE compatibility mode would still be limited to (Primary, Secondary) x (Master, Slave), would it not?  (I know there are some 8-channel "IDE-ish" controllers out there, but I don't think they are really standard... like four-drive floppy controllers...)

We don't include any guest AHCI drivers.  I guess we'd need to provide them on a floppy image like we did for various SCSI drivers etc...  But at this stage I believe we do not do so.

Cheers,

--

Darius

[continuum]

Yep - please provide a driver floppy for 32bit XP and 2003 as soon as possible.
Otherwise warn when someone creates a new XP-VM and selects SATA-disks - like you do when a new XP-VM is created and LSI-parallel or LSI-SAS controllers are selected.

At the moment I use 2 LiveCDs for all my VMware Recovery work - one is 32 bit based on 2003 R2 and one is based on Ubuntu 64.
I would not like it if I have to redefine vmdks as SCSI or IDE each time I need the one based on 2003 for VMs in future.

If I were in your shoes I would consider to hide the SATA option when the selected guestOS has no native AHCI-driver - but I hope you dont pick the easy way out