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?

Comments

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. Good luck!