[linux-audio-user] Re: hdparm

[Matt Barber]

Knecht:
->Not sure I can help, but I end up with a few questions from reading 
this. Maybe your answers will lead someone else to give you a good 
pointer. Mostly I'm confused about your hda/hdb comments with respect to
  SATA drives which are normally on a cable by themselves. In my 
experience hda/hdb are the EIDE drive designations. With two controllers
you then get hda-hdd for EIDE and hde for SATA.<-



I know, it's really weird.  The motherboard/chipset actually puts the
SATA drive on the primary master channel (hda).  I think that's what's
screwing me up.  I'd have to remove it if I wanted to put some other
device on primary master, since I can't move it to another channel or to
a normal standalone SATA channel.



->If you are really using EIDE drives then switching the order of the 
drives can be a problem *if* the drives were not configured for 
auto-detect *and* you forgot to change the jumpers. I don't know if this
would cause the problem that you are seeing though.<-



No, I set the jumpers to master/slave manually... also tried
"cable-select."  No dice.  Seems to me there are two really weird issues
with how linux sees the ide channels on my board:


1)  SATA drive is ALWAYS hda - no way to change that in BIOS (this is a
DFI motherboard, by the way, with the nforce2 chipset)

2)  Secondary Slave is seen as scd0 (at least with the CD/DVD RW). 
Hdparm sees the DVD drive as hdd (I can hdparm /dev/hdd), but I can't
access the drive through /dev/hdd - /dev/cdrom is a link to /dev/scd0. 
It works as hdb or hdc if I put it on another channel.  Weird weird. 
Grub lives on hda (I'm currently dual-booting), but when I put the ide
drive with the /boot partition on (what should be) the hdd channel, the
kernel (which lives on that drive) panics because it can't find init. 
It's a really messed up setup, which I assume is probably to get around
some problem in windows or something, though - I've had nothing but
problems with windows, too.  I'm ready to ditch this board once a load
of cash falls into my lap.  =o)  


I'm wondering if this is an nforce thing, or if there's something else
on the board that's causing it (anyone have an asus nforce2 board?  Is
it similar?) - could be the SATA controller...  also, with this chipset
you have to feed acpi=off noapic nolapic to the kernel to get the damn
thing to run in the first place (some of you may remember a post I sent
about setting the system bus clock to the appropriate value).... anyway,
it's been a real hassle all around.

Maybe the 2.6 kernel would work with it better, but I'm hesitant to put
it on there right now, since this is my only computer.

Matt