Hi all, I hope anyone can help me on this one ..

On my primary IDE controller of my ASUS P2B mainboard I have two Seagate
HDDs. /dev/hda is a 4.3GB UDMA drive, and /dev/hdb is a UATA 2.5 GB drive
(pio4 according to BIOS). I also have a 12x ATAPI CD Rom on /dev/hdc and a
100MB ATAPI ZIP drive on /dev/hdd. 
My root is on /dev/hda, and /usr and swap are on /dev/hdb. The 2.5GB is
dedicated to Linux, but the 4.3GB only has the linux root (approx 250MB),
while the rest of the 4G is formatted FAT16 and FAT32 for Win98.
In this setup, with the two HDDs on the same controller, I notice rather
poor performance with long seek times (e.g. when I enter my username on the
login console, the system waits a couple of seconds before the password
prompt appears.) Especially under Win98 performance is exceptionally bad,
with long startup times (but that is the risk of running MS of course). 
However, when I connected the 2.5 Gb to secondary IDE, with either the CDRom
or the ZIP as slave, performance greatly improved, both in Linux and W98.
Unfortunatelly, with the 2.5 Gb on the secondary, W98 gives a problem with
the CDROM or ZIP (the slave device), and cannot see the device. System
properties tells there is a problem with the second IDE controller, but the
2.5GB disk is visible. It doesnt have any FAT partitions, so I cannot check
if it works correctly. Linux appears to be able to address all devices with
good performance. 

Does anyone have an explanation for my problem, and more importantly a fix ?
I will try tonight to place the 2.5GB as secondary slave, and either the
CDROM or ZIP as secondary master and the other as primary slave. This may
help, but I still lack a good explanation of the root-cause.


Vriendelijke Groeten / Kind Regards,

Alexander van Luijpen

Philips Semiconductors Nederland
Test and Product Engineering 
MOS4YOU - C075 OTP / Consumer Systems Nijmegen - BL Video

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