[H-GEN] Hard Drive Problems

[Martin Pool]

On Thu, Oct 22, 1998 at 06:37:31PM +1000, David Jericho wrote:
> 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?

One step back: something on your motherboard has failed.  It might be
as simple as a loose connector on the IDE channel, or it might be
something very subtle inside the glue chips.  The problem's currently
manifest as a failing IDE channel, but it might well affect other
things that you haven't noticed yet, or affect other hardware you
might add to the machine.  

So I suppose it'd be worth trying a new IDE controller, but you may
end up needing a new motherboard in any case.

> 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. 

It depends on whether the decoding's done in hardware or software.
For IDE channels on the motherboard, I imagine the IDE controller's
just part of the integrated chipset... I suppose some of them might
support swapping the ports as they do for floppy drives, but I suppose
it's not called for very often.

It'll be nice if and when there's a Free flashable BIOS for PC's: if
it didn't have an option to work around this it might be possible to
add one.
 
> _BUT_, and this is a big but. 

Yeah, you need to get more exercise. <gdr>

-- 
Martin Pool

Pegging the Clueless Meter....  "With PCs 1,000 times more powerful
than they used to be, our encryption keys can and should be 1,000
times bigger too. That means cryptokeys of at least 56,000 bits."
Toni Patti, http://www.developer.com/journal/ITfocus/083198_patti.html