On Friday 16 February 2001 05:58, you wrote:
> 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?
>
Yep, it does.
>
>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.
Well, tell me more and I'll make sure it is at least on the web site at
72last--just email privately.
> 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!
Yet they have your money and you have their chip.<g>
How about doing this? Since you have 2.4 on a machine with this particular
chip (we have NO examples) check the speed with hdparm and the settings. How
much tuning has happened? What can you produce if you leave autotune out and
try hdparm settings yourself? Which method works better? And a dmesg with
your report would be helpful.
>Their mass storage chip
> should have taken over all 4 IDE channels at ATA100.
I agree, but then what would happen to ide controllers plugged into the
motherboard, like other Promise cards? I am sure Promise thought of that.
Civileme
--
QA/Software Testing
