pci IDE controller problem
 

I wanted to put in an extra hard drive so i got an PCI IDE controller that is based on the Silicon Image 0680 chip-set.
I got a dual-boot system with Windows XP pro on the first drive (MASTER) and Mandrake Linux 10.0 on the second drive (SLAVE).
Once i plug in the controller (even without a hard drive attached) it won't boot Linux.
I can boot windows without and the card seems to work perfectly but when i try to boot linux it fails. I get the window i normally get during booting but then it hangs.
It doesn't seem to find the hard drive and can't load the kernel. Once i plug out the card again it boots perfectly.
Does anybody know what my problem is? and how can i fix this?

Do a backup of your linux system before trying this. You can try doing an "Upgrade" install of mdk9.1 with the PCI card installed by booting off the first install cd and choosing the upgrade option. Don't select any new packages and it will go pretty fast and should reconfigure for your new hardware. When doing the upgrade check to see if your mdk hard drive is still recognized as "hdbx" with the PCI card installed. The devices on the expansion card are normally designated hde, hdf, hdg and hdh for the two extra ide ports on the expansion card. The onboard ide ports should remain hda, hdb, hdc and hdd but your mileage may vary. If putting in the expansion card shifts your hdxx designations around, you may have to do some editing of your lilo.conf and/or fstab to get mdk to boot with the expansion card installed.

Did you find the cause of the problem? I think I've got something similar. I have a working Mandrake 10.1 system, with 3 IDE hard disks and cd writer. I put in a DVD writer in place of the CD writer a few weeks ago - all fine. I'm now trying to put in an IDE controller card so that both CD writer and DVD writer are connected up, along with the 3 IDE drives. I've got an unbranded Silicon Image 0680 based Ultra ATA IDE PCI Controller card with RAID function (was cheap and I'm not using RAID). When the 0680 controller card is plugged in, MDK10.1 will not boot - it ends with a Kernel panic. Under windows everything works! Removing the 0680 controller card, allows MDK10.0 to boot.

However I can get into linux with the 0680 controller card installed if I boot off a CD copy of Mandrake Move. Which shows that the first four drive positions have been moved from hda, hdb, hdc, hdd onto hde hdf hdg hdh.

I've played in Bios and can't find anything to change this behavior.

Obviously I can probably manually change fstab to allow MDK10.1 to boot with the 0680 controller card, but I'd like to understand why the existing drives are being moved under linux, and is there anything I can do to stop this move. I really don't want to be faced with re-installing MDK or editing fstab, because there is a good chance I'll take the controller card out again in the future.

For the record it's just the DVD writer I'm trying to hang off the 0680 controller card (though the drives still move if just the 0680 controller card alone is plugged in) all the IDE drives are physically unchanged. The motherboard is an ECS KT600-A.

Victory. I don't know what causes the problem, but the solution is to add ide=reverse to the parameters at boot time. I got the clue from the thread "Native Linux ATARAID with Sil0680 ATA133IDE RAID" see http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...highlight=0680

It certainly lets MDK10.1 boot up.