Hey Everyone,

Decided to try and install an IDE controller to play around with software RAID on my Gentoo system.
After installing the PCI card, the system boots just fine and recognizes the card as a mass storage controller using IRQ 11. I gleamed this information by simply typing:

cat /proc/pci

This is where I am stuck.
As far as I can tell there is no entery in /dev for the device. I realize that I may need to add a /dev entry for the device in order to access the disks attached to it, but I am not sure how to progress. I know the card works with Linux because I did an 'automated' install of Mandrake a long time ago and it picked up the card with no problems and all the drives I attached to it worked very well.

I am using devfsd by the way.

Thanks for any pointers.

It won't have a specific /dev assigned to it. It uses /dev/hdx where x = e,f,g, and h.

To figure out what devices it is using, you should see a message like the one I get on my old system with a Promise Ultra100 card (view these messages with dmesg):

PDC20267: chipset revision 2
PDC20267: 100% native mode on irq 9
PDC20267: (U)DMA Burst Bit ENABLED Primary PCI Mode Secondary PCI Mode.
ide2: BM-DMA at 0x1080-0x1087, BIOS settings: hde:DMA, hdf:DMA
ide3: BM-DMA at 0x1088-0x108f, BIOS settings: hdg:pio, hdh:DMA
hde: IBM-DTLA-307045, ATA DISK drive
ide2 at 0x1420-0x1427,0x1416 on irq 9
hdh: WDC WD400EB-00CPF0, ATA DISK drive
ide3 at 0x1418-0x141f,0x1412 on irq 9
hde: max request size: 128KiB
hde: 90069840 sectors (46115 MB) w/1916KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63, UDMA(100)
/dev/ide/host2/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 p2 p3
hdh: max request size: 128KiB
hdh: 78165360 sectors (40020 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63, UDMA(100)
/dev/ide/host2/bus1/target1/lun0: p1[EZD]


As you can see here hde and hdh are the devices... why I am using the slave on ide3 when there is no master I have no idea... must have had one too many beers when I connected the ide cable in that system.

jtshaw,

Thanks for the replies.
Well, I managed to get the controller to see drives with nothing more than ext2 file systems on them.
Now however, if I attach a disk with say, Winblows XPee ( sorry couldn't resist), the controller does not pick up the drive. I recompiled the kernel with Microsoft compatibility options and still have no luck.

Any idea?

Thanks again.