I just bought an ATA IDE controller card(PCI) to put an extra hard drive in my computer that I had laying around. Problem is when I put the card in, it gives a kernel panic. In some of the error messeges that race by I caught something like it not being able to unpack something on hda1. So I was thinking maybe having this card in changes the assignments for hard drives around, but I also tried putting no HD on the card, two on the card then the primary HD on the card and other various configurations of that to see if it would find whatever it was looking for.

When I remove the card, everything goes back to normal.
I'm running mandriva 2005LE on a P4 and the card is made by Silicon Image, SIL0680 ATA/133

Any Ideas?

"So I was thinking maybe having this card in changes the assignments for hard drives around"

A few motherboards handle add-on IDE controllers in an unusual manner. For those motherboards if you add a secondary IDE controller it will switch the addresses for the onboard IDE controller and the secondary controller. In Linux terms these addresses:
/dev/hda
/dev/hdb
/dev/hdc
/dev/hdd

are switched with these addresses:
/dev/hde
/dev/hdf
/dev/hdg
/dev/hdh

A subset of this type of motherboard allows you to control the address switching in the BIOS. In the BIOS the switched addresses will probably be called IDE0 and IDE2.

So the first thing to do is to look through your BIOS and see if you can manipulate the IDE addresses. If not then move your bootable hard drive to the corresponding cable position on the secondary controller and see what happens.

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Steve Stites

so hda = hde should it handle it in that manor OR onboard ide = hda-d and pci ide = hde-h?

"so hda = hde should it handle it in that manor OR onboard ide = hda-d and pci ide = hde-h?"

Yes, provided that you have one of the wierd motherboards.

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Steve Stites