ATA 100 and Bad Things (note the capital B and T)
 

well, the Bad Things did happen ... again. I've had this problem before. Linux distribs do not like my ATA/100 setup. You know, seeing as how it's been around for at least two years, you would think they would compile it into the default kernel for crying out loud.
So, I get through the install just fine, everything's going great, Win2k is still working good, and I dive into linux ... except it can't detect my second bank of IDE hard drives. It is into this bank that my one and only hard drive is plugged in. It is the self-same hard drive I had just recently installed Slack to. The way my computer is setup, the motherboard has a normal bank of hda-hdd that's ATA 33/66 compatible. Then it has a second bank, hde-hdh that are ATA 100. I have my DVD and my CD burner on hda and hdc, and the hard drive on hde.
Now, I know there's ways around this, I can get a boot floppy that'll boot into my /dev/hde9 boot partition, one that supports ATA/100 as well. But that's not the issue: my floppy drive has not worked since before Christmas. Seeing as I rarely ever use it, it hasn't been a problem, until now.
I've tried to fix it before, new drive and a new cable, same symptoms as before. It hits the floppy, lights up, and just sits there, uselessly doing nothing. Slack timed out after 45 seconds, however Win2k is not that smart and will hit it about 4-5 times "just to make sure it didn't magically get fixed or something." :rolleyes:

So, I guess what I'm getting at is:
1. I need to find an image of a slack kernel (may not be the right word here, unsure) that fits on a disk and supports ATA/100. Where can I get one of these?
2. I'd like it as all one image, so I can write it to a CD instead of a floppy and boot off the CD, should work in the same way.
3. How do I go about putting ATA/100 support into Slack? I assume it's a simple (hehehe) kernel re-compile, then I should be up and running. I'm gonna see if perhaps I can make it work on the lilo-command line, but I really don't think it'll work, considering the loader program can't find the drives anyways.

Wish me luck, and I'll keep ya'll all posted as to the progress. Oh, by the way, I'm goin' with Sawfish until I get around to installing KDE 3.0 =).

 

Well, I went out and found the ata100.i bootfloppy image and wrote it to a bootable CD, and that worked. I got it up and booting, now I've got to figure out how to get it to boot on its own. I'm not quite sure how to go about doing this ... Other than that, slack seems to work just fine.

I have a similar setup to you with a Promise ATA100 card. All of my Linux distros are currently installed on a hd attached to this drive (hdg).

The 1 time I installed Slack 8.0 I used the 245 bare.i kernel that exists on the 1st Slack cd; in addition the card required special boot parameters. The formula for finding the right boot p's can be found in this howto: http://www.geocities.com/ender7007/

So following formula given there, the boot p's for my card were (e.g.): "linux ide2=0xdfe0,0xdfae ide3=0xdfa0,0xdfaa" (of course it will be different for yours). It wasn't necessary for me to include the cards irq.

I used a floppy to boot after the install (Syslinux) as I already had Lilo installed from a different distro. But it was necessary to edit the syslinux.cfg file on the floppy with this statement: "APPEND root=/dev/hdg5 ro linux ide2=0xdfe0,0xdfae ide3=0xdfa0,0xdfaa". Also once install was completed I had to enable DMA.

Hope this helps...

That worked, thanks for the heads up man. :)

howdy. believe i downloaded my slack from Linuxiso.org. about all i did with slack was install opera, which was a tarball, it was a experince , but i did get it installed. now checking out other distros. red hat 7.2 is nice,, i have raid installed, a lot faster than my non-raid systems. impressed with mandrake 8.2, xine installed but have not yet figured out how to run it yet. now want to install debian, unless it shocks me, i will probably put mandrake back on drive. later ronss