On 4 Jul, Terry Collins wrote:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> > The old drives are now slaves to the 40Gb drives -
>
> Is this wise?
> It sounds like you are mixing ATA100 and older styles on the same IDE
> chain.
I finally had a chance last night to follow up on Terry's suggestion. Very
interesting results (he's significantly right):
1) If I disconnect the EIDE drives as slaves on the ATA100 cable (and
re-jumper the ATA100 drives to be master-only), Windows 98 boots
just fine.
2) Yet Red Hat 7.1 is able to access all the drives even when they're
mixed (ATA100 master, EDIE slave), perfectly.
The conclusion seems to be that older operating system (RH6.2 and
Win98) can't handle mixed drive types on a single controller.
Actually, RH6.2 will boot up, with some prodding. Win98 just grinds to
a halt.
This was news to me, but probably lots of you already know... ATA100
drives (or the IDE controller or the PC BIOS?) draw a strong distinction
between a drive jumpered as "Master or single drive" and "Master with
slave". The BIOS wouldn't even proceed as far as the boot prompt ("No
master disk"), until I'd jumpered the drives correctly. (I don't think
the EIDE drives are quite so fussy.)
Terry - many thanks.
In case anyone is interested, I postponed the Optus cable modem
installation. I'm very optimistic that this time there'll be no dramas.
Thanks again for all thosesuggestions, especially to Terry who came up
with the solution.
luke
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