Hardware ATA/66 Controllers and Installing Linux

Jeb Campbell asks: "Has anyone tried to install on the only hard drive on their system, with that drive hooked up to an ATA/66 Card? I had RH 6.1 on before I switched hard drives and it worked fine, but when I tried to reinstall, my system no longer recognized the card. Anybody done this? I figure I can put another old hard drive in and install, then dump it to the new hard drive, but I don't know if it will recognize the card (www.dr-tech.com) but their ATA/66, card isn't there)." (Read more.)

The trick is to realize that you might have to fiddle with the motherboard/controller BIOS before you get the proper boot order. ATA/66 chains are treated like SCSI chains on some machines, which means you have to explicitly tell it to boot from there before it will. For some cards, you might need to boot from another partition or a floppy, then LOADLIN in to the install image.

Any other suggestions?

what a coincidence

[DirkGently]

Just an hour ago I was trying this very thing with my BP6. I got through the install, but when the kernel goes to boot for the first time she gets to recognizing the drive on the 66 controller and she reboots. I can, for an instant, glimpse the 'hde' like I would hope. I think its whatever it tries to do afterward that causes problems. RH 6.1...which is probably part of my problem.

But I needed a working box like asap, so I said sod it and went UDMA33.

Dirk

PS: I know Gentus [gentus.com] exsists, but downloading from there has been damn near impossible lately.

How to get it work--for real.

[medicthree]

Okay, there are a few different "fixes" floating around. Here is one that has worked for me and a number of colleagues.

Ultra 66 How-To [geocities.com]

And once you have it installed, and want to patch the kernel so you get true UDMA66 support for your drives, visit http://www.linuxnewbie.or g/nhf/intel/hardware/udma66.html [linuxnewbie.org].

Hope this helps.

How to use Ultra ATA/66 controller at install

[muengineer]

Here's how to do it: First, find a cool boot disk, one that lets you boot a fairly decent system from floppy. Boot from this, and then cat /proc/pci. When your Ultra/66 controller(s) come across, you'll see 3 lines of memory addresses, i.e.:

I/O at 0xd800 [0xd801]

I/O at 0xdc00 [0xdc01]
I/O at 0xe000 [0xe001]

Make note of the first and second addresses (we'll call them A and B, respectively). Then, use the following parameter at boot time:

ide0=A,B+2 (in the above example, this would be "ide0=0xd800,0xdc02")

If you want to enable both controllers, use both an ide0= and an ide1= with the proper memory addresses for each. In most cases, this will let the kernel see the Ultra/66 controllers as the primary and secondary IDE controller. More info can be found at the Ultra-DMA Mini-HOWTO [linux.com]. Good luck!