Matt Barber wrote: > Knecht: > ->Not sure I can help, but I end up with a few questions from reading > this. Maybe your answers will lead someone else to give you a good > pointer. Mostly I'm confused about your hda/hdb comments with respect to > SATA drives which are normally on a cable by themselves. In my > experience hda/hdb are the EIDE drive designations. With two controllers > you then get hda-hdd for EIDE and hde for SATA.<- > > > > I know, it's really weird. The motherboard/chipset actually puts the > SATA drive on the primary master channel (hda). I think that's what's > screwing me up. I'd have to remove it if I wanted to put some other > device on primary master, since I can't move it to another channel or to > a normal standalone SATA channel. Not necessarily. There is a kernel config option (at build time) that says something like 'Boot offboard chipsets first'. This option tells the kernel that drive controllers not in the normal chipset get first option to boot. If the system finds them (like SATA) then SATA could become hda. However I would have then assumed the normal hda EIDE drive would become hdc. > > > > ->If you are really using EIDE drives then switching the order of the > drives can be a problem *if* the drives were not configured for > auto-detect *and* you forgot to change the jumpers. I don't know if this > would cause the problem that you are seeing though.<- > > > > No, I set the jumpers to master/slave manually... also tried > "cable-select." No dice. Seems to me there are two really weird issues > with how linux sees the ide channels on my board: > > > 1) SATA drive is ALWAYS hda - no way to change that in BIOS (this is a > DFI motherboard, by the way, with the nforce2 chipset) See comment above and look at how your kernel is configured. I don't know what's really going on though... > > 2) Secondary Slave is seen as scd0 (at least with the CD/DVD RW). > Hdparm sees the DVD drive as hdd (I can hdparm /dev/hdd), but I can't > access the drive through /dev/hdd - /dev/cdrom is a link to /dev/scd0. > It works as hdb or hdc if I put it on another channel. Weird weird. > Grub lives on hda (I'm currently dual-booting), but when I put the ide > drive with the /boot partition on (what should be) the hdd channel, the > kernel (which lives on that drive) panics because it can't find init. > It's a really messed up setup, which I assume is probably to get around > some problem in windows or something, though - I've had nothing but > problems with windows, too. I'm ready to ditch this board once a load > of cash falls into my lap. =o) Very strange. Do you have SCSI emulation (and support for all the SCSI drive types, like HD, CD, etc.) built into your kernel? Strange... > > > I'm wondering if this is an nforce thing, or if there's something else > on the board that's causing it (anyone have an asus nforce2 board? Is > it similar?) - could be the SATA controller... also, with this chipset > you have to feed acpi=off noapic nolapic to the kernel to get the damn > thing to run in the first place (some of you may remember a post I sent > about setting the system bus clock to the appropriate value).... anyway, > it's been a real hassle all around. Sounds like it. > > Maybe the 2.6 kernel would work with it better, but I'm hesitant to put > it on there right now, since this is my only computer. What distro are you running? I would think that an nforce-2 would be much better with a 2.6 kernel. I run 2.6.8.1 and things work well for me on my Gentoo boxes. On my Planet box I'm still pretty far back with an older 2.4 kernel, but that's very old Pentium 2 or 3 hardware IIRC. One of those big, box-like processors that look like a piece of bread sticking up from the MB... > > Matt > >
