Hi all,

I have the following setup on my PCM-9584 single board computer:

IDE Master: An old 2 GB harddisk.
IDE Slave: A-data 1 GB CF card.

The board has a CF card slot and when CF card is inserted it's seen as a slave IDE device both in BIOS and in OS.

Problem:

In the kernel that I've compiled (2.6.24.5 + SquashFS + unionfs + Xenomai 2.4.3) slave CF card detection fails (actually it's detected but obviously improperly) by saying: hdb: unknown partition but this does not cause any data corruption. I just can't mount read & write to the card. (I've tried many times to fdisk and it fails). And I blamed the HW first...

However, when I boot the board with 2.6.18 Debian Kernel it's detected fine with its single ext3 partition; I can mount and r/w.

I've checked the configuration of my kernel many times, tried enabling/disabling many settings & recompiled but none of it worked. I'm stuck. (I'm enabling the new ATA driver and including support for the ICH6 chipset.)

Any help on this is quite appreciated,

thanks!

You can start by booting Debian again and checking to see what extra modules may need to be loaded:

lsmod | grep

There may be intermediate chip drivers needed to make the CF slot usable. Also, most CFs these days are "disk-on-chip" and behave just like a HD, but who knows - you may have an odd one that requires an extra driver.

Update: If CF is configured as master and other PATA disk as slave, everything works correctly.

I would prefer the other way around but there seems to be a compatibility issue and it's no big deal.

How bizarre - so there's something funny with the header on the hardware to set the CF as slave?

At any rate, if it works it works and there is really little difference between being 'master' and 'slave'.