[ale] ata 100 and RH 7.0

[Michael Smith]

Is there any way of knowing whether you are using ATA-UDMA/100 when linux is
booting up(Kernel Message?).  I have everything working but I may not be
really using the drive to its full potential....

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Egolf [mailto:cegolf at ugholf.net]
To: ale at ale.org
Sent: Monday, January 22, 2001 7:01 PM
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] ata 100 and RH 7.0


JB Wells wrote:
> 
> I've heard in the past that RH 7.0 supports ATA 100,
> but upon trying to install it this morning on a system
> with an Asus A7v mb and IBM ata 100 drive, the
> installation program wouldn't recognize it.
> 
> I've also seen posts in the past regarding various
> kernel patches that could be applied to get this
> working.
> 
> Has anyone successfully run a Redhat 7.0 installation
> on an ATA100 drive?  If not, could someone point me to
> more info on these patches/fixes?
> 

I don't know what chipset the Asus board uses, but I've successfully
installed RH7.0 on Abit motherboards that have the ATA-UDMA/66 and
UDMA/100 Highpoint chipsets.  Basically, you have to patch the kernel or
use 2.4.x to get native support for these IDE channels, and Redhat 7.0
doesn't support them AFAIK.  However, you can provide kernel parameters
for adding the additional IDE channels.  Again, if this is different for
ASUS, ignore me, but the Abit mb's have UDMA/33 channels for IDE0 &
IDE1, and the UDMA66/100 stuff is on IDE2 & IDE3.  The following
mini-HOWTO describes how to find out the addresses for these other
channels (look for the section on enabling HPT366 without UDMA/66
support):

http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~b6506063/hpt366/

Basically, you'll have to start the install, and when you get to the
GUI, press ALT-F2 to get to a shell console.  Then, 'cat /proc/pci |
less' to find the I/O addresses of the device.  Then reboot and when you
get to the text-based startup screen to begin the install, instead of
pressing enter, you'll have to type something like "linux
ide2=0xb000,0xb402" for example.

The one thing I always forget is that until you patch the kernel, you
still won't have the support, so you'll have to do this each time. 
After to do this to boot the new OS the first time, edit your
/etc/lilo.conf and add an 'append="ide2=0xblah,blah+2"' to each stanza,
and rerun lilo.
-- 
============================================================================
                               Chris Egolf
             http://www.ugholf.net     cegolf at ugholf.net   
============================================================================
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