Dear fellow SimplyMEPIS users,

My 40 Gb hard drive on my PCI Promise Ultra100 controller card is not being automatically detected by SimplyMEPIS 3.3.1-1.

Do I need to do something special in order to make SimplyMEPIS recognize this drive?

I am running SimplyMEPIS 3.3.1-1 from partition hda7.

My setup is as follows:
Motherboard IDE1 = hard drives hda (80Gb) and hdb (40Gb)
Motherboard IDE2 = CD-RW and DVD-RW drives
PCI Promise Ultra100 card IDE1 = 40Gb hard drive not yet detected by SimplyMEPIS 3.3.1-1
PCI Promise Ultra100 card IDE2 = nothing connected at this time
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Additional detailed notes...

Verbose description: SimplyMEPIS is already installed on a hard drive (partition hda7) that's directly connected to the motherboard. I have 3 hard drives in the PC and 2 CD/DVD devices. Connected to the IDE controllers on the motherboard are: Maxtor 80 Gb HD, Quantum 40 Gb HD, HP CD-RW, and NEC DVD-RW. Connected to the PCI Promise Ultra100 controller card is an IBM 40Gb HD. The IBM 40Gb hard drive is automatically detected by the PCI Promise Ultra100 during boot. Windows XP, 2000, and 98 all see the IBM 40Gb hard drive that's connected to the PCI Promise Ultra100 controller card. Thus, I know that both the hard drive and PCI Promise Ultra100 are functioning correctly. It appears to be a bug with SimplyMEPIS. UGHH. This is the one and only fault that I have experienced with SimplyMEPIS...otherwise it's a perfect 10 out of 10. I realy love SimplyMEPIS and do NOT want to jump ship...I hope a fix exists.

lspci yields:
0000:00:0b.0 Unknown mass storage controller: Promise Technology, Inc. PDC20267(FastTrak100/Ultra100) (rev 02)

uname -r yields:
2.6.10

dmesg doesn't appear to mention anything concerning the PCI Promise Ultra100 controller card

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks and sincerely yours,
Matt

The Promise card is incompatible with mepis plain and simple. I know; I have one too and that's the way mepis has been from day one. It's never been fixed. There is a workaround somewhere on their forum but it's a terrible hack and even when it works you won't be able to enable dma on any drive on the promise controller.
You may want to take a look at another distro; mepis is the only one that ever had a problem with my Promise Ultra 100 card so just about anything else will work fine. If you like mepis, try PCLinuxOS:

http://www.pclinuxonline.com/pclos/index.html

It's based on Mandrake, is kde oriented like mepis, uses apt/synaptic like mepis and is very user friendly.

Thanks kilgoretrout. It's nice to know that I wasn't doing something wrong.

I viewed 90% of the 70+ screenshots on the PCLinux OS website. I will certainly download it and give it a try.

From the screenshots, it appears to have the qualities that I admired about SimplyMEPIS:
Synaptic Package Manager
KDE
Autodetection of all partitions on system
NVidia drivers (not quite sure about this though)


Sincerely yours,
Matt

I don't believe pclos has the nvidia driver but it does come with flash and java IIRC. You need to install your kernel source to install the nvidia driver and I believe there are packages available through synaptic for the nvidia driver once you have the kernel source installed. You might want to check their forum if you have any questions. It's a good distro and has received excellent reviews for being newbie friendly. It's also a live cd like mepis so you can test it out before you install it.

SUCCESS! I am now running Linux with support for the PCI Promise Ultra100 controller card and I have an official NVIDIA graphics driver installed. However, I had to jump ship to a different version of Linux in order to achieve victory…PCLinuxOS preview .91.

Thanks to kilgoretrout (in the LinuxQuestions.org forum) for making the recommendation to give PCLinuxOS a try.

For a while, I was caught in a conundrum:
1) EITHER, I was running SimplyMEPIS 3.3.1-1

• Without support for the PCI Promise Ultra100 controller
• SimplyMEPIS comes prepackaged with an official NVIDIA graphics driver

2) OR, I was running PCLinuxOS p.91

• With support for the PCI Promise Ultra100 controller
• But PCLinuxOS did not come prepackaged with an official NVIDIA graphics driver.

Pertinent to this post, the PC contains a PCI Promise Ultra100 controller card and an NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS graphics card. It took me a while to get PCLinuxOS to install an official NVIDIA graphics driver for my specific NVIDIA card. First, I followed the instructions of davecs (instructions) but without success...(note for later: the DKMS-nvidia package installed the NVIDIA 7676 driver). I thought maybe I needed to use a different version of the NVIDIA driver, so I went to the NVIDIA website to see what driver they recommend. At first glance, it appeared that they were recommending the 7676 driver. Since it APPEARED that 7676 was the correct driver version for my card, I convinced myself that I was doing something wrong. I then went and read the readme file (readme) that comes with the NVIDIA graphics driver. In Appendix A , it stated that the 7676 driver did not support my NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS graphics card.

I knew that SimplyMEPIS 3.3.1-1 had an official NVIDIA graphics driver, so I booted in to SimplyMEPIS to find out what version of NVIDIA graphics driver it was using. It turns out that SimplyMEPIS was using NVIDIA graphics driver 7174. With this knowledge in hand, I searched the PCLinuxOS forums for instructions on installing the NVIDIA 7174 driver. Thankfully, ikerekes posted a superb set of instructions for installing the NVIDIA 7174 driver (instructions for installing NVIDIA 7174). I now have BOTH PCI Ultra100 (and access to all drives connected to the PCI Ultra100) and an official NVIDIA graphics driver. I am a happy user of PCLinuxOS preview .91. I’ll continue to keep an eye on both SimplyMEPIS and PCLinuxOS. I look forward to the next version of each.