IDE: 2nd port

[diethard]

On an old (self assembled ...) i486 I installed SuSE Linux 6.2. The machine contains a Holtek IDE board (ht6560/6570). I thought that, following the hints in the manual, I could activate the 2nd IDE port by providing the kernel parameter ide0=ht6560b. But no device is recognised at all, though I have a hard disk attached to this port.
Note: The BIOS doesn't recognise the 2nd port either.
The kernel boots without any diagnostic messages, so this seems to be o.k., but when I try "fdisk /dev/hdc", fdisk complains about not being able to connect to the device.

What did I do wrong, or forget, or misunderstand, or ... ?




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Diethard Ohrt
Graz, Austria

[furrycat]

You have to provide the address of the IDE port, somewhat ike this:

ide1=0x6400,0x6403

Of course, you need to know the right numbers. In my case I did

cat /proc/pci

and looked for the IO address of my IDE controller (then I added 2 to the second value because that's what you have to do). If your kernel doesn't recognise it on bootup you'll have to look for an entry labelled "Unknown device" or something. In any case, if you can find the numbers either like this or some other way (Windows, guesswork, ...) maybe you'll be OK.

At home I actually have an hpt366 card and the relevant numbers are 0xbc00 and 0xbc07 (or something, I can't remember). I found out the information I needed from the HPT366-mini-HOWTO which you can find from LinuxDoc as usual.

Good luck.