civileme wrote:
>
> > This is the Promise Ultra 66 card? Hmmm... not going to be of much help to
> > know this but I have this card and the 7.2 install recognized it fine. Is
> > there any chance you have some type of interrupt conflict going on there?
> >
> > Holly
>
> Nope. We patch the kernel for ATA/66 and ATA/100 support. As a result, some
> out of spec disk drives have trouble with us and run fine on RH. Or run fine
> on 7.1 (patched for ATA/66) and have write errors on 7.2 (Patched for
> ATA/100). We will fail on recognizing one of two card controllers if the
> user has that configuration (6 ide channels for up to 12 drives). Don't
> laugh; someone wrote to us with that very configuration.
>
> Only 4 ide channels are probed on setup -- other channels (up to a total of
> 6) can be recognized later by specific configuration but will not be
> recognized on boot. modprobe -c will show you why. So we cannot install to
> drive i, j, k, or l unless it is SCSI.
Thanks and interesting. I must have missed the fact that the drive in
question was beyond the fourth IDE channel.
Let me ask a somewhat related question then for an oddball set up. I have
a server that's all SCSI (i.e. no built in IDE controllers on the mobo at
all). Because I had some equipment on another box that I wanted to have in
this one (IDE CD-RW and 30 GB IDE HDD), I installed a Promise Ultra 66
card. I installed the drive on the first controller on the Promise card
and the CD-RW on the second. Also, in case it's relevant, the CD-RW is one
of those that insists on being set as slave to work even when it's on the
channel by itself. Makes me wonder why they give you a jumper, but that's
beyond the scope of this question. :))
Ok, the IDE HDD is a Maxtor 7200 30GB drive. Everything was going
swimmingly until I started to burn CDs. Some went fine, but during the
last burn I did, I crashed my IDE HDD big time (you haven't lived until
you've had to manually fsck a 20GB partition <sigh>). I had read your
suggestion elsewhere of backing the UDMA setting down for someone else's
drive and decided to try that. I also decided (since I'd lost most
everything on the IDE disk anyway) to reinstall so that the server would
boot from the IDE drive. That's because it refused to boot from the SCSI
RAID array because the server's BIOS always saw the IDE first. I was tired
of booting from floppy. :))
Now my config is the same but with the mbr and / and /boot on the IDE and
the data from which I'd burn CDs is now on the RAID array. I also added
the hdparm line to rc.local to force the HDD to udma2 thinking that this
might be necessary since the CD-RW on the other controller is only udma2.
What the heck to I know.
Anyways, I haven't burned any more CDs since doing that because I've had
other projects going. And I wanted to know if you think that the udma2
thing will help. Also, did the CD burner residing on the Promise card but
on the other controller have anything to do with this do you think? I
found it strange that there would be any relationship since they are on
different controllers, but maybe the Promise card is weird. Bottom line,
is this config workable or do I need to do something entirely different?
I do have some more SCSI drives on order to populate a second RAID array
and am also likely to eventually replace the current burner with a SCSI
one, but heck, the more disk space the merrier; I'd like to keep the
Maxtor in there if possible just for the extra 30GB.
I'm running Mdk 7.2 btw. And please let me know if there's any other info
you need to make an educated guess. I'm somewhat of an intermediate user
and learning as I go on this one. :) Just experimenting away. But if the
burner won't work in this config, I need to drop back and punt for a
backup strategy. :)
Holly
