Hi, there, first post here for me, but I belong to some other forums, so I "know the drill". I already did a thread search and could not find my particular problem.
OK, here's my issue. I have an ASUS A7V mainboard with 2 ATA100 connectors and 2 IDE connectors. I have 2 CD devices plugged into the IDE connectors via seperate cables, and I need it that way. I have 2 seperate physical Hard drives hooked up to the primary ATA100 connector via 1-80 pin cable. The drives are a WD Caviar 4311.9MB, (C: ) with Win 98 on it and a Seagate Barracuda ATA II 30.6GB split into 3 - 9.xxGB partitions,(D: ), (E: ), & (F: ) with Win XP Pro on the first, (D: ) both with jumpers set to cable select. I D/Ld MEPIS 3.3 Linux distro, burned correctly as it works on another PC. The Live CD runs, but cannot mount my HDs. I have tried all sorts of different configurations and settings and nothing. I have tried both drives individually with different jumper settings and played around in the BIOS with no positive results. The Live CD boots and runs OK and finds my floppy and both CD devices, but no HDs! This is really frustrating me as I would really like to give Linux a shot, but not at the expense of rewiring my system as I like it the way it is for my situation. Is there any way I can make this work? I am new to Linux so I may need extra help if it is complicated. Thanx in advance for any info, hope I can do this

2 cdroms on one cable is sorta smart & dumb depending on your main uses.....

2 cd on one chain means copying on the fly is a bit glitchy.......cdroms on HD chains will slow down your HDD ATA settings unless all devices are common ata 100 level.....unlikely as cdrom firmware is behind the times..



Cable select is a very bad thing for many computer systems as it involved a guess by the hardware and OS......


first thing i would do is nail down the HDD as master & slave same with the cdroms......doesn't matter what chain they are on really ..

A7V boards came a few different versions......ill take a punt and say that your boards is using RAID controllers.......try loading up knoppix or the sarge netinstaller from debian and see if wither of those detect the HDD.....if they do the info you need will be in lspci id say...

my guess here is that your a7v is using a promise ATA 100 fastrak style card and you need the driver...the ATA raid cards are actually PCI to SCSI to IDE cards and the bios teams the IDE drives together and them identifies itself as a SDA/RAID name....


may i ask why you want your cdroms on the same chain? you seem to think it's a big deal and im curious as to why....

To answer your question, Grommet, I have a game that is very dear to me and it only works on Win98 with the CDROM on it's own cable. May seem strange to most, but that's just the way it is for me. That is the only reason that I still use 98 and the only reason that I have my CDROM and CDRW on seperate cables. It won't work if two CD devices, of any type, are on the same cable as the one the game is using. As for the cable select, it is the only way I can get either Windows to boot. I tried setting jumpers to master on the XP drive and slave on the 98 drive and it wouldn't boot either OS. I didn't try it the other way around though, maybe try later, see if that works. This may sound lame, but what can I say, I love to play.
My A7V is just that, no versions or anything, and I don't believe it uses RAID, but not positive on that. Not sure what you mean about "card", my connectors are all on the mainboard itself, if that is what you are referring to?
Anyway, I would like to use Linux, but seems alot to swallow with my configuration, so I may have to wait until I can build a system for my game with the HW I have now and get new stuff for this, but could be a couple of months.

Guess you guys don't like gamers, huh?

LOL, as long as the game works hehe


HDD that dont talk to each other when jumpers etc are set lead me to beleive that your hard disks may be the culprits here. I have some WD & Seagate drives that wont work with each other at all (no Detected) unless the WDs are master....pain in the hole everytime i move drives around.

Id say your issue may be similar to mine with the HDDs....

the other option you have is to unplug 1 disk and 1 rom and try installying with only 1 & 1 setup...that may allow you to install, after install turn them back on and see if theres any logged info if it hangs etc

I have tried that both ways, no luck, the only thing I have not tried yet, is setting the WD 98 drive as master and the XP drive to slave, I'll try that as long as someone thinks that my setup is possible, even willing to try another distro if that might work?

Hey raydunne,

First, welcome to LQ!
Second, I just bought that board for my son at a used pc shop for a spare duron processor I had lying arround.

Man, that is one goofey board. Trick is to get linux to recognise the promise ATA100 contoller chip, otherwise it does not see the disks. What I discovered was to use the primary ATA66 to load linux on the hard drive, then switch the hard drive to the ATA100 connection. The gotcha is once on the ATA100 connector, the drive is no longer /hda, /hdb,/hdc, or /hdd, but /hde, /hdf, /hdg or /hdh and your settings in fstab and lilo/grub need to be changed or else you will get a kernel panic because the bootloader will not be able to find /boot or /. You can change these settings while running to whatever ATA device and master/slave setting the drive will occupy when you move it.

I realize that you are trying to run a live CD and not install to the disks but I though I might provide what I went through and maybe give you an idea of what you might need to do.

When you boot the pc with the live CD, do you get the promise bios to fire - I think this is automatic with the 80pin cable attached, but I don't remember.

Hi Franklin, glad to hear from someone with experience on this. Yes it is a goofey board, I think it was experimental when I got it, but I love it. It has been rock solid for me with Windws, both 98 and XP. I only have an 800MHZ Athlon and it keeps right up with the 2.53GHZ in the family PC and I have alot of programs. I do want to install eventually, but just getting my feet wet for now. It is nice to know that I at least have a chance here. I have postings in a few different forums, and this is the first sign of hope so far, I appreciate the welcome, and your input

>>> your settings in fstab and lilo/grub need to be changed or else you will get a kernel panic because the bootloader will not be able to find /boot or /. You can change these settings while running to whatever ATA device and master/slave setting the drive will occupy when you move it.
<<<

I would appreciate any more info you can give me on this part of your post. Thank you.

>>>
When you boot the pc with the live CD, do you get the promise bios to fire - I think this is automatic with the 80pin cable attached, but I don't remember. <<<

I am not sure on this question, how can I find out?
Ray.

Hey again,

I wish I could be more helpful - like I said, I put the board (with a duron 700) in a box I built for my son and he lives with his mom so I can't go and poke around until this weekend. Even then, his situation was different than yours - I'll explain:

He is only 8 - he likes linux, but needed windows as well for games (what else). I had a big problem with win2000 in that the promise driver for win2000 takes exceedingly long to boot (like 60 seconds after the bios posted). This is a well known bug by the way. At any rate, I decided my son was not about to notice the difference between ATA66 and ATA100 so I made my life easy and plugged the harddrive into the ATA66 primary ide slot, disabled the ATA100 chip in the device manager, and called it a day. Based on the description of your system, this is not an option you can take advantage of - nor would you want to.

Have you googled this board? I found a couple of sites devoted to this thing in both windows and linux, but the board is getting old and the info is a bit dated.

http://www.geocities.com/ender7007/

The above link was mentioned in a post on this forum. I do not usually use live disks so I do not know what differences would exist for this over a straight harddisk install. Many sites mention reconfiguring the kernel, but this was with older 2.2.X kernels and I do not believe this to be required any longer.

I guess you are a bit new to linux so I'll kindly suggest that you google for basic info on fstab. This is the config file that tells your linux system what partitions everything is located on and where to mount these partitions. If you did as I suggested and loaded linux on a hard disk that was mounted on ide0, then your fstab would state that your / directory was on /dev/hda1. If you then moved the disk to ide1, then the disk would now be /dev/hdc and / would be /dev/hdc1. If you did not make the changes in fstab, then when you booted, your boot loader and your system would look for the kernel and other partitions on /dev/hda and it would not be there. On this board, if you move the disk to the ATA100 slots, then the designation would be /dev/hde or /dev/hdg. These examples assume this is the master drive in each instance. If the slave, then the alternate letters would apply - b, d, f, h.

When I mentioned the promise bios, what I remember happening was that you would get 2 bios postings, the first would be the ususal with the memcheck and the id of the ATA66 drives - in your case these would be the cdroms. Then another bios page would start and the promise bios would look for a bootable disk on the ATA100 slots. This would only happen if an 80 pin cable was attached and the bios was configured to boot from the ATA100 slot. You had mentioned changing bios settings and I just wanted to be sure that the ATA100 where still enabled.

Anyway, that was alot of typing and I'm afraid not much help. I'll try to remember to bring a Knoppix CD to my son's house this weekend and see what I find out.

Good luck. I post back if I find out anything useful.

OK, thanx for all this info, it will definitely help out. I will investigate some more. You say "live disk" as if there is another type of installation? I do plan an install of some type or another eventually as I want to pursue a career in computer field and want all the know how I can possibly get my grips on. So if it means getting different HW than so be it, in the meantime, I guess I can put the game aside and hook up the HDs on the primary IDE connector for now, as a career is worth more than a game I will do some more reading also so that I can understand Linux in general too. A poster from another forum encouraged me to jump right in and I guess if I had a normal system, it may have been a possibility, but at any rate this is a learning experience in itself, so, though frustrating, I guess it is helpful in a way.

I hooked everything up on the normal IDE connectors and all is there. I am gonna install tomorrow I also found some info on the A7V forums about how to make it work with ATA100/RAID Will play later after I use it some. Normal config. doesn't seem any slower now anyway, so will try some overclockin too Anyway, I'll be around with more questions as I come across them, Thanx for info

OK, I found all my HDs by hooking everything up on the IDE/ATA66 connectors. Live CD lists as follows: hda1/, hdb1/, hdb5/, and hdb6. I want to install on hdb6/, but when I try, it only has hda/ and hdb/ for options. I try hdb/ and when asked to select /root partition, the box only has "none" in it. QTParted won't run either, errors "it was not possible to make a new partition table" Any help is appreciated!

Boy, for the love of Linux, there sure ain't much support! All the Windows forums I use are responsive. I'm a member of 5 different Linux forums and can't even get help installing Thanx, guess I'll just stick with Windows then