Rajveer Singh said on Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 10:28:32PM +0530,: > Yes, I agree, drivers for disk(IDE/SATA/SCSI/SAS chipsets, thanks > to Mahesh for correcting me) are required by kernel not by BIOS but > I'm wondering, why BIOS doesn't need drivers to access it. What > special techniques are used in BIOS, so it can detect disks without > it's drivers. If it's true, why kernel can not use the same > technique to detect the new disks.
Detecting a disk is not same as managing the disk, reading and writing data. And if the chipset itself is not detected, the disk on the chipset will not be detected. But, hey, not just BIOS, even the Grub does a better job at accessing disks, partitions and filesystems than the kernel itself. Long back, I used to have a very queer problem - the Install CD would work, but the kernel installed by the install CD itself would not work with certain IDE chipsets. Funnily, the boot loader (lilo / grub) would load. And then things would hang. "Disk not found!!!". THis happens when the initramfs on the install CD contained a generic image, with larger number of modules, while the installed kernel image did not include the required drivers into the initramfs. Figured this out only recently. Using a different distro for install, and later installing the desired distro using chroot usually worked. That is what I could figure out at that time. But yes, you have a very valid point here. Unfortunately, I am a mere user, with little knowledge to C perl or ruby. -- Mahesh T. Pai || http://[paivakil|fizzard].blogspot.com First they came for the Jews; and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists; and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists; and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me; and there was no one left to speak out for me. _______________________________________________ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
