I'm currently trying to send ATA commands to a SATA HDD. I thought I'd dedicate a thread to this, so every info related to this can be dumped here.

As I understand, from looking to MHDD, it seems that there are 2 steps:
1. Find the SATA controller on the PCI bus
2. Send the ATA commands to the specific controller.

I just found the following resources myself already:

* http://www.waste.org/~winkles/hardware/pci.htm => a nice tutorial on scanning the PCI bus
* http://www.pci-card.com/pci_pas.zip => A PCI bus scanner for dos.

Now, I think finding the hardware isn't going to be that hard after reading an analyzing the above (still busy on that though). However, how to proceed if a SATA controller had been identified ? Can you just program it like the IDE controllers, in the exact same way ?

Any info on this will be greatly appreciated !

Lol, I've already found it To document it so the info can be useful to somebody else:

1. Find the SATA controller in your system. You can use the info in the links above to do this.
2. Once you have found the controller, you should list which I/O ports it has. The PCI_PAS.zip source explains how u can do this.

After you've found the I/O ports on the controller, one of the ports is the port you should use to send the ATA packets to. For example, for my controller, there are 5 ports, at adresses:

0xA800
0xA400
0XA000
0X9800
0x9400

I've tested them, and if I write to the first port, I communicate with the HDD ! So, to make clear, instead of using registers 0x170, 0x171, 0x172 etc (for the first IDE controller), i used 0xA800, 0xA801, 0xA802 etc.

aimtrading, I realise this post is very old now.. but I'm having trouble working out how to scan for the sata device and retrieve its ports.. any help would be appreciated

What's exactly your problem ?

So many years ago, Can any guy tell me how to detect a SATA adapter that isn't attached at PCI bus ?

Any info on this will be greatly appreciated !

What exactly do you mean? Do you mean a USB-SATA adapter? Or an IDE-SATA adapter? Or something else? If you can include a link to the manufacturer's webpage for the adapter you are asking about, that would be helpful

Vulcan, that's my mind, thank u (smart), I think scan the BUS that the harddisk attached to could resolved the above problem that I asked.
and now I got another problem...
I read the SATA SPEC, try to send SATA commond to a SATA HDD, my code like:
#define _STATUS_BSY_ 0x80
#define _STATUS_DRDY_ 0x40
#define _STATUS_DF_ 0x20
#define _STATUS_DRQ_ 0x08
#define _STATUS_ERR_ 0x01
void wait_until_ready(WORD portBase)
{
__asm
{
L_READ:
mov dx, word ptr[portBase]
xor eax, eax
add dx, 0x7 //status
in al, dx
test al, (_STATUS_BSY_ | _STATUS_DRQ_)
jz L_RET
nop
nop
nop
jmp L_READ
}
L_RET:
return;
}
//------------------------IDENTIFY DEVICE
struct IDENTIFY_DEVICE //part of data returned
{
WORD word0;
WORD word1;
WORD word2;
WORD word3;
};
void identify_device(IDENTIFY_DEVICE* buff, WORD portBase)
{
__asm cli
wait_until_ready(portBase);
__asm
{
mov dx, word ptr[portBase]
add dx, 0x7
mov al, 0xEC
out dx, al
}
wait_until_ready(portBase);
__asm
{
mov dx, word ptr[portBase]
mov edi, dword ptr[buff]
xor ecx, ecx
L_LOOP:
cmp ecx, 8
je L_BREAK
in al, dx
stosb
inc ecx
jmp L_LOOP
}
L_BREAK:
__asm sti
return;
}
1. Is my code got some error?
2. Where's the content in SATA SPEC introduction how to send a SATA command?
any help would be appreciated!

hi，all
with the code：
add dx, 0x7 //status
in al, dx
test al, (_STATUS_BSY_ | _STATUS_DRQ_)
I got the _STATUS_DRQ always is 0x1, never be cleared to ZERO..

What's wrong with my code ?
thx!

I want to help you but it is difficult to understand assembler code. This is a simple program to read HDD information, I think you should use C programing because with complex function in PC3000, a assembler code will very very long.

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