Eugenio Diaz wrote:
>
> Well, despite all that effort in documenting the problem, no action has been
> taken to solve it.
But action has been taken, in the ongoing development sense, but not
the field support sense. Maybe by the kernel team rather than
Mandrake. For example I installed the latest Cooker yesterday
(kernel 2.4.1-12mdk) and it happily installs and runs through the
Promise Mass Storage chip.
> As I test new kernels, I see that some times they work, and
> when the next update comes, it does not work again; which leads me to believe
> there is a real problem with the ide patches. And under no circumstance is this
> an intermittent hw problem, since 2.2.16 work every time, and the ones that
> don't fail every time. I normally just update my rpms, and have an install that
> went from RH 5.2 to Rawhide to Cooker; and for a while I thought the problem
> was because of that, but when I tried doing a boot from the install image, I
> got the same problem, which means that anybody that has a Promise (may be with
> WD drives) based ATA66/100 will fail to install Mandrake. Isn't that important
> enough to get some attention?
Yes, it certainly is. I for one complained loudly and got this reply
from Pixel:
"Ron Stodden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
"> I think it inescapable that 7.2 and Cooker (both tree (floppy
images,
> etc) and isos) are reissued supporting ATA100 drives, since there are
> so many already in the market and 7.2 is the current Mandrake Linux.
"For the moment i don't care much, i'm using the old 7.2 boot kernel
until the
2.4 ramdisk bug is fixed. *Then* you will have (b)leading edge!"
Assuming that is imminent, it's good news. But I still think he
does not appreciate the field support, retrofit, recall, implications
for 7.2 downloaders or purchasers - maybe that belongs to Mandrake
QA? Probably all it would take is a little note attached to all
unsold copies with the append string to enable the Promise IDE
channels as IDE 2 & 3 so that the installer can find these drives.
Or showing how to disable both the existing IDE channels and with the
required lilo append string to make the Promise IDE channels appear
as IDE 0 & 1?
MandrakeSoft may be hopefully hiding behind the imminent release of
8.0, plus maybe there have not been that many registered complaints
received about this difficulty.
Muse: It is strange that Promise chose that way of doing it. On
Windows it is acceptable because shifting your hard drive farm from
IDE0 & 1 to IDE 2 & 3 will cause the same drive letters to be
assigned to the same partitions. But on Linux that concept does not
apply, and Promise should have known that. Changing your disk farm
from hda, hdb, hdc and hdd to hde, hdf, hdg & hdh is not trivial
since none of those Linuxes will run any more and it takes work from
another running Linux located somewhere else to fix them up. IMHO,
Promise should be taken out and shot! Their mass storage chip
should have taken over all 4 IDE channels at ATA100.
--
Regards,
Ron. [au]
