OK let's begin by comparing apples to apples.
Most IDE setups, including Promise, are correctly detected and set up by the
installer and handled properly by the kernel. This includes ATA/100 or UDMA5.
Some folks have more IDE channels than are autoprobed. Drive i on 7.2 will
never be autodetected... It has to be configured after boot, because while
major and minor numbers exist, it is not autoprobed (Run modprobe -c for
yourself).
Some folks have streaming problems on CD burning. I know this doesn't sound
like the same problem, but it appears to be related to one or more of the
problems I will categorize here.
1. ASUS A7V -- to detect the embedded Promise controller you have to boot
the CD in rescue mode and
lspci -vv | less
and scroll through the output. The current advice on mandrakeuser.org is to
do
linux ide2=0xa000 0x9802
(which sets the controller up to run drives e and f) and the 0xa000 and
0x9800 are the first of five hex numbers attached to the irq where the drives
set up. It is done for ide2 because the oters are already assigned by
autodetection and there is a need to keep things simple. Of course strings
to the install kernel could reassign all the drives if desired. And the
bootloader is a followup--the append strings must be given to LILO or Grub
for transmission to the boot kernel.
2. LG CDRWs seem to have a problem with the ATA/100 backport for 7.2,
because kernels compiled without them run and burn CDRWs fine while those
with them balk at setting DMA on the CDRW which can, but not necessarily
does, break streaming. Results with burning are mixed, sometimes working,
sometimes not. This occurs whether or not there are any other IDE devices on
te system and with selected motherboards. Aditional reports are welcome.
3. Setting DMA on some systems (and this happens on so few that we have
little data) simply does not work for one or more drives, and we have a
partition check that hangs the system. It might be related to a CDRW or to a
Promise ATA/66 Controller. More data is welcome. Particularly welcome is
any data of anyone able to reproduce this error _without_ WD drives.
Unfortunately, this brand seems to be a factor in the failures, and it does
have hardware differences from other drives. One empirical factor is that
setting idex=noautotune sometimes stops this behavior (where x is the
offending channel).
Civileme
