[H-GEN] Hard Drive Problems

David Jericho davidj at meesha.humbug.org.au
Thu Oct 22 04:37:31 EDT 1998


On Thu, Oct 22, 1998 at 01:33:47PM +1000, James McPherson wrote:
> 
> but of course it's all moot if your primary ide channel decides to die on
> you. :( grrrrr. hopefully I won't need to get a new motherboard though. Does
> anybody know if disabling an onboard primary channel will turn the onboard
> physically secondary channel into an onboard primary? Or if disabling an
> onboard primary then adding a new channel via plugin card will screw things up?
> 

Depends on the motherboard model and brand. Most of the time no, as the
secondary bus is on port 0x170, as opposed to the primarys 0x1f0. 

_BUT_, and this is a big but. You maybe able to tell the bios to boot "Drive
E", being the master secondary. This is one way you can get older motherboards
to boot your SCSI disks over your IDE disks.

If you have a failed primary, and you don't want a new motherboard, look at
the BusLogic (Mylex?) IDE caching cards. They cost between $120 and $200, PCI
bus based, two IDE buses. Support upto 64MB of ram onboard, and there is a
linux driver. 

But then again, $200 is a new motherboard, so I'd bite the bullet. 

...Or you could just go down to the local second hand computer store and spend
$10 on a ISA dual bus IDE interface.

-- 
David Jericho
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