cooker-ppc  

Re: note on Dual G4 benh install vs. rescue ultra-ATA device

Stew Benedict
Mon, 03 Nov 2003 12:41:46 -0800

On Mon, 3 Nov 2003, Isaac Csandl wrote:

> A few months ago, I was having trouble with the Ultra-ATA drive in a dual G4 
> tower. The 9.1 system would install, but not boot. Eventually I gave up and 
> moved the HD to the "normal" ATA bus on the motherboard. The drive won't show 
> up at all in the normal mdk kernels, smp or enterprise, if it's connected to 
> the Ultra ATA bus. 
> 
> But recently I figured out what seems to be a strange quirk. The Ultra drive 
> shows up as /dev/hde when you boot the rescue CD with 'install-gui-benh 
> rescue text video=ofonly', but when I booted the machine from the HD with the 
> benh kernel, it shows up as /dev/hda. Odd.
> 
> On the HD, I've installed the recent benh kernel from Mandrake Club, version: 
> 2.4.21-1bh-mdksmp, which is working well (it feels as fast as before, 
> although only one CPU shows in gkrellm -- i'm curious if this is correct, but 
> content that it works for now... thoughts, anyone?).
> 

Probably just x86-ism in gkrellm.  cat /proc/cpuinfo output is different 
on ppc than x86.

BenH kernel will generally be better on newer hardware.  There is a 
considerable lag before Ben's stuff makes it into kernel.org.

> I just thought I'd share the experience in case anyone else bumps into this 
> problem, because I wasted a lot of time editing /etc/fstab and 
> /etc/yaboot.conf (and doing the accompanying chroot, mount /proc, ybin 
> procedure in rescue mode) to change everything to /dev/hde, before figuring 
> out what was happening, that it should be /dev/hda, not /dev/hde.
> 

Thanks!

-- 
Stew Benedict

--
MandrakeSoft