append = tell kernel I have more drives then detected
 

Hi!

I am using a PCI-IDE card. And my hard disks is connected to it. But my cd-rom drive is still connected to the motherboard IDE.

When I boot up, the kernel doesn't detect the mother board devices (cd-roms and floppy).

What should I append to the kernel?

The cd-roms is connected to Primary Master and Secondary IDE channel on mboard. Floppy drive on /dev/fd0 is not detected as well.

Please help, I need the append message. Thanks in advance.

oh, dude :) i had the same prob first time. its detected- but slack doesnt auto mount em. so what you do is in terminal

cd /mnt
mount cdrom
mount floppy

(need a cd/disk in cdrom/floppy to do it =))

Well, I did mount [/dev/hde till /dev/hdh] -r /mnt/cdrom
All I get is /dev/hde till /dev/hdh is not a valid block device. And I have checked the kernel message (dmesg) It doesn't detected the cdroms. I am very sure of this.

When I plug the cd-rom to the PCI-IDE card secondary interface, it is detected and work fine.

Have you tried mounting /dev/hda till /dev/hdd ?
Try also mounting /dev/sr0 (I have a debian distro that did something I don't understand, but mapped /dev/hdc to /dev/sr0) (note the 0=zero)?

Like you said, it's probably a kernel issue, in which case I have no clue.

Okay I got the kernel to detect all my peripherels now.

BUT

I have to use the stock kernel.
It detects my harddisk to be ATA100 only. Himem is not enable, therefore I only get to use 896Mbyte of RAM.
No more APM.

What could be the problem? Could it be SIL680 driver bug? Cloud it be boot-off-board bug?

I tried appending hdg=cdrom. It won't work. Anyway, have to wait till next week to try recompiling kernel with /dev/hdf2 set-up.

Oh I forgot to mention how I revert back to the stock kernel.

I pre-edit the lilo.conf and fstab. It need to be change to /dev/hdf instead of /dev/hdb; basically remapping the drives letter.

But I can't install the remap lilo.conf just yet. So I reboot and boot to Slackware 9 disk 1. Let it boot of the cd, mount /dev/hdf2 /mnt/root.
chroot /mnt/root
lilo
replace the /etc/fstab (with remapped).

reboot and boot a custom compiled kernel (boot-off-board switch off). Kernel panic.

reboot and boot stock (Slack 9) kernel. Successful with probs mention above.

I got no clue about slackware.

If this is a hardware bug, one of the things to try is other distro's. You might try KNOPPIX which runs off a CD without installing any files onto the hard drive. It has good hardware detection.

I would recommend against installing KNOPPIX onto your HD (which you can do). Just use it as a troubleshooting tool.

Well I have Windows 2000 on the same machine. And it runs fine. I would guess that the driver loaded for my PCI-IDE support up to ATA-100 only. The is a newer driver for it which supports up to ATA-133.

I think solution is not that far away. Just recompile the kernel for the next 100 times. HAhaha.. That is not the problem, the problem is putting the bootsector image into Win2k. Damn I need to install GRUB...

Im too lazy to read everything thats posted here, but are you sure your kernel finds your pci-ide card? is it installed? if it works correctly then the rest should to;)

good luck

Alright, I got everything running under 2.6.0-test3.

I suspect my 2.4.21 kernel source was tinted by previous compilation (if this is possible).

I am going to recompile 2.4.21 with brand new clean source and see what happens.

Now, I can use all cd-roms even with scsi emulation on my cd-writer and also I am getting ATA 133 for my hard disks.

Guess I need to bring to conclusion this issue.

Here is my conclusion:

When I recompiled the new kernel, and put it to search reverse order (PCI first then mainboard). I did not compiled in the driver for the mainboard IDE. This causes the kernel to quit searching after detecting PCI-IDE.

Therefore, it shouldn't be any problem to have it in reverse order or normal order.

I also compiled RAID driver for my Silicon Image PCI-IDE card. Anyway, I am not using RAID configuration.

2.6.0-test3 kernel seems to behave better then 2.4.21 in the sense that it doesn't disable DMA for my 80GB hdd :)

Can't wait for the 2.6.0 official release.