I've just done some investigating, possibly duplicating work, and dug into the IDE spinup issue. My conclusion, the Linux kernel is buggy.
IDE spinup is trivial. From my testing all you have to do is wait until the ide busy bit is clear, and then send commands. IDE drives do all of the hard work for you. The tricky part with IDE is to get a reliable drive detection routine, as this was not an initial design requirement. I believe I have accomplished that as well. What I do. After the busy bit is clear send the IDE channel a software reset. Then I read the signature bytes from each drive, and if the signature is correct I have found an IDE drive. I confirm this by read/writing some registers and veirfying the contents stick. This will require wider testing to confirm it really is reliable. After you know where you have drives running IDENTIFY_DEVICE/IDENTIFY_PACKET_DEVICE where appropriate is still needed to get the drive into a usable state. But having confirmed already that the drive exists this is much easier. Anyway after I do a little more code cleanup I will check this code into the LinuxBIOS tree. What I do know. My code handles IDE drive spinup when the kernel fails, and the kernel doesn't have any trouble after my code has run. Eric
