I am running an Athlon based system in a In-Win Q500 (300W P/S) case and an ASUS K7V m/b w/ latest patches as of mid November. I started off running the system with a 10 GB 7200 RPM IBM drive (Ultra33) as the boot on ide2 and a 45 GB 7200 RPM IBM drive (Ultra100 capable, but running at Ultra66) as ide3 on a Promise Ultra66 controller. In the not too distant past my 10 GB drive started to get rather problematic, so I moved off of it (right after reflashing the BIOS so that I could take full advantage of ECC RAM) and onto my 45 GB drive which I moved to ide2. One crazy idea I came up with recently is to get a little more leg room trying to set up a poor man's software RAID 5. I noticed that it is not supposed to be a good idea to mix the 2.2.x kernel with ReiserFS nor is it supposed to be a good to put more than one device per IDE channel when I did some homework on this idea. As far as I can tell I should be able to set up a software RAID if I keep the above mentioned and I use ext2 and follow the procedures in the Software RAID HOWTO. Correct me if I am wrong. I came across two problems with my idea: 1. I can't get ide3 to play well with me. What would happen is that the system would start coming up, detect all of the drives, assign IRQ's and I/O address and then hang immediately after. At first I had the Ultra66 acting as ide2 and ide3 and then I rearranged things so that the Ultra100 was ide2 and ide3. This didn't seem to make a difference. I then ripped out everything except for the video and one of the Promise cards. With both cards (one at a time) even in different slots I got the exact same results. That being with one drive plugged into ide2 as master and one drive plugged into ide3 as master the machine would hang in the same places as mentioned before. With ide3 unplugged the machine would come up. Also with one card being plugged in at a time, even moving around which PCI slot was used both would come up with the same IRQ and base I/O for each bus. (IRQ 10 for both busses, 0x9400-0x9407 for ide2, and 0x9800-0x9807 for ide3.) The maximum configuration that I have managed to get the system to come up on is one drive on each of ide2,4,5. If someone could give me insight into why ide3 doesn't like me any more I would greatly appreciate it. 2. I know I read somewhere that the Linux kernel is set up to be able to handle up to 8 IDE channels before I embarked on this journey and could potentially be reconfigured to handle more. I looked at the info page fore mknod and I looked at how things are set up in /dev and a question arose. The scheme used for minor numbers for the hdx devices seems to make good sense, but the scheme for major numbers seems like it has a few more ticks to it then what I am following, if there is really a scheme at to it. If someone could tell me the major numbers to use for hdi, hdj, hdk, and hdl I would greatly appreciate it.
