[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: some remarks on weird platform installations



I might as well share my two cents on installing Linux on a Gateway box.
Here goes:

At 06:18 05/04/99 -0700, you wrote:

>* onboard IDE had the Zip on hda, CDROM on hdc, cd-rw on hdd. the 13.5 
>gig WD ultra-DMA disk sitting as Primary master on an add-on Promise
>Ultra-66 card. RHL's boot floppy didn't detect it by itself, after some
>amused digging in /proc/pci and a succesful search of mailing list on
>web archives through google.com/linux I found the solution was similar
>to the one for Ultra33 - add a kernel commandline like
>ide2=0x10c0,0x1016 (YMMV, each system may allocate it in another place)
>and hde will reveal itself. Ofcourse, finding that information meant
>rebooting into windows and connecting to the ISP... what would have I
>done with a virgin machine?

>* forget about lilo when your root is 10 gigs down the disk. loadlin
>worked smoothly for me, just remember that ide2= line again...

I have a Promise Ultra-33 IDE controller, and it worked smoothley with the
RH5.2 install disk... though it didn't work with the RH5.1 installer. For
some reason the fix you mentioned (I read about it too) didn't work for
me... I had to wait until RedHat relesed 5.2 (I wanted the RH dist).

It's kinda weird what controller GW puts in the box... I bought a G6-266
from GW international like a year and a half ago, and I got a Promise
Ultra-33 controller. My sister got a G6-400 something like half a year ago,
from Mediatech (however you spell that), which is a shop in israel
importing GW computers, and they got no extra PCI-card IDE controller, only
the onboard IDE controller. And now you say that GW are selling Promise
Ultra-66 controllers... weird.

I personally have 3 IDE devices: 1 Mitsumi CD-ROM, and 2 HDs (Quantum +
Western Digital). My HDs were connected to the Promise card primary master
and slave connections, and the CD-ROM to the primary master on the onboard
controller. I have no reason to use the Promise card, therefor I removed it
and connected the two hds as hda and hdb, and the cdrom as hdc. The
performance wasn't decreased, I have one more free IRQ, one more free PCI
expansion slot, LILO working, and no problems with the kernel or installers.

In the case you presented, you have 4 IDE devices, so you might consider
removing the Promise card. BTW, if you have more than 4, you can connect
just the first HD to the on-board controller, and put windoze partitions on
the drive(s) connected to the Promise card, since win recognizes it just fine.

>* reconfiguring linux-2.2.5ac3 for that machine I dug into "boot
>off-board devices"and it seems like it may solve the ide2= commandline,
>question is if I want to use it? it will rename all the hd? device names
>since ide0 and 1 will now be 2 and 3 and vice versa. I'm sticking to
>using it as hde for no, until someone tells me I'm missing anything.

Tried that with 2.2.3 while I still had the Promise card... and it didn't
work. Not only that it didn't work, I changed the /etc/fstab to the new
letters, and when I rebooted, I got a kernel panic since it couldn't mount
the root partition. The rescue disk I had was broke, so I had to boot with
the install disk, mound the HD, and change the file.

Maybe it works with the new kernels, dunno.



Hope this helps some of you out there :)

--
Oren Sarig
sarig@isdn.net.il