Is it at all possible to install the boxed retail version of Drake 8.0 to a drive on a Promise ATA-100 controller card. All of the info I've read (and tried) deals with on-board controllers, but the advice doesn't quite work with a PCI card. I've had a Win98 drive on the controller in another system, so I know the card itself works.

System:

Gateway PII-400 w/ Intel BX-440 mobo
256MB RAM
Voodoo 3 vid card
SMC 1211 NIC
Promise Ultra100 PCI controller
WD 10GB hard drive (hda)
WD 40GB (ATA-100, currently hdb)
32x CD-ROM (hdc)
Redhat 6.2 on hda
Mandrake 8.0 on hdb

I moved the 40G drive to the controller card's 1st IDE channel and, following instructions found in several places, determined the correct I/O adresses to pass to the kernel at installation time. In both text and expert install modes I entered the following at the boot prompt:The boot up process recognizes the card (with the correct addressing), finds and correctly identifies all of drives, and continues normally until it gets to checking the partitions. The check runs through all partitions on hda, but stalls when it starts to check hde, which is the 40G on the Promise card. At that point I have to do a hard power-down.

I've read that Mandrake freq was supposed to overcome these problems, and perhaps 8.1 does, but I don't have a burner in the system. Am I stuck having to purchase 8.1, or is there a workaround for 8.0?

TIA

I've got a Promise ATA 100 card in my P100 box. I had a ton of problems getting the card to work at first. Once I switched to the 2.4.x kernel the OS found the card on it's own without any boot parameters. I never used the drive on the Promise as my primary, it was always just a mount. At first the drive would just halt the entire system at random, mostly when the drive was being used a lot. I finally switched out the Segate 20GB for a Maxtor 30G and I stoped having my problems with the controller. It has worked fine since. Go figure.

At my work we have a couple of Dual PIII machines that came with the Promise 100 card installed. We have since yanked all the 100 cards since they were always crashing the boxes. We run Win 2k in those machines.

Thanks for the reply crabby.

The funny thing is that I am running the 2.4 kernel (2.4.3 to be exact). I do have a RH 6.2 install on the primary master driver of the onboard IDE channel, but as far as Mandrake goes, the drive on the Promise would be the boot drive, and not just a mount.
Hmm, back to the drawing board.

Unfortunately I can testify that Mandrake 8.1 does not solve the problem of Promise ATA-100 cards. I recently bought one so that I could use my Atapi ZIP250 drive (long story short:

Bought a nice new computer with onboard ATA-100 controller.
Bought ATA-100 40Gb (IBM) harddrive. Put it on hda.
Bought IDE CD-Burner. Put it on hdc.
Bought IDE DVD drive. Put it on hdd.
Bought IDE ZIP250 drive. Refused to install it on hdb because that would slow my ATA 100 harddisk down to 66 (or whatever the zip used).
Finally stumped up the cash + bought a promise 100 card - it was actually cheaper than a lot of 66 cards.

OK, so it was still a long story ).

Installed Mandrake 8.1, recognises that I have an atapi ZIP250 on /dev/hde, but when I look, there is no /dev/hde!

I know that there used to be a program under 7.1, 7.2 and 8.0 called MAKEDEV that I presume made devices (or at least 'links' to them) but it does not exist under 8.1!

Although my problems are not as fundamental as DMR's (I can live with having to use Windows to access my ZIP at the moment) but it would be a lot more convenient if I didn't have to.

D-oh! *smacks forehead*

Thymox, you might actually have something there. I never checked /dev for an "hde" entry, which might be why my install fails where it does. I'll check when I get home from work tonight. I do have the MAKEDEV program, so if hde doesn't exist, I can create it. Perhaps there's hope...