# Question on getting a 2nd IDE Controller to work

## TheWhiteKnight

Well, I have my issues down to VERY FEW now in running Gentoo.  

I have SAMBA and this 2nd controller card to figure out and that SHOULD do it.  For the age of my system (most people laugh at what I prefer) it handles Gentoo better than WinXP.

My question is this.  I have read and seen people having issues with having a secondary IDE card on their systems and recognizing the devices that are attached to the card.  I know I need to modify my fstab for the system to load the drives at boot, or recognize them, but here is my lspci:

```

00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8363/8365 [KT133/KM133] (rev 03)

00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8363/8365 [KT133/KM133 AGP]

00:07.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super South] (rev 40)

00:07.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)

00:07.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 16)

00:07.4 Bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super ACPI] (rev 40)

00:09.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10k1 (rev 08)

00:09.1 Input device controller: Creative Labs SB Live! Game Port (rev 08)

00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: Linksys NC100 Network Everywhere Fast Ethernet 10/100 (rev 11)

00:0b.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AHA-7850 (rev 03)

00:0c.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 0649 Ultra ATA/100 PCI to ATA Host Controller (rev 02)

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV34 [GeForce FX 5200] (rev a1)

```

The RAID bus controller (Silicone Image) is the one that I am dealing with.  I have 2 smaller drives, a 100 Zip, and another DVD burner attached to it.  How can I get the card and drives to recognize through Gentoo?  I compiled the SI drivers in my test kernel, but nothing.

- Josh

----------

## desultory

A quick and lazy way to figure out how to get most hardware configured to at least work under Linux is to boot a copy of Knoppix on a system with that hardware installed. Boot it and if the drives connected to the controller are recognized run lsmod to see what Knopix used to operate the hardware.

Though before going even that far, did you compile the module into the kernel image or did you have it built as a loadable module. If the latter, make sure the module is loaded.

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## TheWhiteKnight

 *desultory wrote:*   

> A quick and lazy way to figure out how to get most hardware configured to at least work under Linux is to boot a copy of Knoppix on a system with that hardware installed. Boot it and if the drives connected to the controller are recognized run lsmod to see what Knopix used to operate the hardware.
> 
> Though before going even that far, did you compile the module into the kernel image or did you have it built as a loadable module. If the latter, make sure the module is loaded.

 

I have a bootable copy of Gentoo.  Will that work?  I mean I have Knoppix as well, but the drives are available when I boot the livecd.

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## desultory

The same approach should work with the Gentoo disc as well, if it uses a module which is not built in. Even if the Gentoo disc does not use a loaded module to interface with the controller it might have the kernel configuration available through /proc/config or /proc/config.gz.

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## TheWhiteKnight

 *desultory wrote:*   

> The same approach should work with the Gentoo disc as well, if it uses a module which is not built in. Even if the Gentoo disc does not use a loaded module to interface with the controller it might have the kernel configuration available through /proc/config or /proc/config.gz.

 

I'll have to take a look.  I booted my Knoppix CD and low and behold, they all came right up no problems at all, nothing.  Same as my live cd.  I will look at that /proc/config* to see if I can find it there.

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## desultory

No modules were loaded for the controller?

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## TheWhiteKnight

Ok, this is the lsmod from the Knoppix cd

```

Module                  Size  Used by    Not tainted

autofs4                 8724   1 (autoclean)

af_packet              13448   0 (autoclean)

nls_iso8859-1           2876   0 (autoclean)

ntfs                   50784   0 (autoclean)

agpgart                34720   0 (unused)

emu10k1                59752   0

sound                  54540   0 [emu10k1]

ac97_codec              9992   0 [emu10k1]

soundcore               3364   7 [emu10k1 sound]

tulip                  38560   1

emu10k1-gp              1192   0 (unused)

gameport                1276   0 [emu10k1-gp]

parport_pc             24776   0

parport                22496   0 [parport_pc]

serial                 51876   0 (autoclean)

usb-uhci               21836   0 (unused)

usbcore                57088   1 [usb-uhci]

apm                     9612   1

rtc                     6908   0 (autoclean)

cloop                   5168   1

aic7xxx               110008   0 (unused)
```

----------

## desultory

Upon interpretation of the texts we find that only one of the named modules is connected to storage hardware:

 *TheWhiteKnight wrote:*   

> 
> 
> ```
> aic7xxx               110008   0 (unused)
> ```
> ...

 

That module is for a SCSI controller which lspci described as follows:

 *TheWhiteKnight wrote:*   

> 
> 
> ```
> 00:0b.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AHA-7850 (rev 03)
> ```
> ...

 

Unfortunately, it is not the IDE RAID device described as follows.

 *TheWhiteKnight wrote:*   

> 
> 
> ```
> 00:0c.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 0649 Ultra ATA/100 PCI to ATA Host Controller (rev 02)
> ```
> ...

 

So much for the easy way.

Which brings us to perusing the kernel source tree, where we proceed to find; nothing particularly obvious.

Despondent, we consult an oracle, which tells us in part: "Silicon Image, Inc. (formerly CMD Technology Inc)".

Upon learning of this I opine:

```
<*>         CMD64{3|6|8|9} chipset support
```

Sorry it took so long.

----------

## TheWhiteKnight

Desultory, 

Yeah I figured that my SCSI card would show up (with my CD tower), the CMD64 I'll have to recompile and check.  I looked at that before, but I assumed (which I have learend that assuming in Linux usually doesn't end well) that the CMD64 was for the AMD64 architecture only.   :Embarassed:   I'll make them, recompile and try again.  I'll BRB and check it out.

Thanks for the detective work.

----------

## desultory

The flaw in your reasoning comes from how the option is labeled as much as anything. The 'CMD64{3|6|8|9} chipset support' option provides support for CMD643, CMD646, CMD648 and CMD649 chipsets, the name uses a variation on brace expansion which is somewhat different than that used in, for example, bash or grep, hence the confusion.

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## TheWhiteKnight

What does "feature only available with HAL" mean?  I am getting an fdisk error that says it cannot open /dev/hdf.  Do I have to add a special syntax when  referencing drives on an external controller?  If so what is the syntax I need to use?  Is it still /dev/hda (example only).

- Josh

----------

## desultory

 *TheWhiteKnight wrote:*   

> What does "feature only available with HAL" mean?  I am getting an fdisk error that says it cannot open /dev/hdf.

 

I am unsure exactly what that indicates, aside from the abvious. Perhaps posting more context would allow for a determination.

 *TheWhiteKnight wrote:*   

> Do I have to add a special syntax when  referencing drives on an external controller? 

 

Barring rather peculiar circumstances, no.

 *TheWhiteKnight wrote:*   

> If so what is the syntax I need to use?  Is it still /dev/hda (example only).

 

It is.

If you are unsure of the name given the device, look in /sys/block.

----------

## TheWhiteKnight

Odd, I only have A, B, C, & D.  I have E, F, G, & H in there.  A is my main drive, B is my Main burner, C & D are my music drives.  

E is my second DVD+R, F is my Zip-100, G is my 17GB Programming Drive and H is my video conversion drive.

I have my fstab is configured correctly:

```

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.

#

# <fs>         <mountpoint>   <type>      <opts>      <dump/pass>

# NOTE: If your BOOT partition is ReiserFS, add the notail option to opts.

/dev/hda1      /boot      ext3      noauto,noatime   1 2

/dev/hda3      /      ext3      noatime      0 1

/dev/hda2      none      swap      sw      0 0

/dev/hda4      /var      ext3      noauto,noatime   0 2

/dev/cdroms/cdrom0   /mnt/cdrom   iso9660      noauto,ro   0 0

/dev/hdc1      /mnt/mp3a   ext2       noatime      0 0

/dev/hdd1      /mnt/mp3b   ext2      noatime    0 0

/dev/cdrom/cdrom1   /mnt/cdrom1   iso9660      noatime,ro      0 0

/dev/hdf      /mnt/floppy   auto      noauto      0 0

/dev/hdg      /mnt/IBMsm   ext3      noauto,noatime  0 0

/dev/hdh      /mnt/video   ext3      noauto,noatime  0 0

# NOTE: The next line is critical for boot!

proc         /proc      proc      defaults   0 0

# glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for 

# POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink).

# (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will

#  use almost no memory if not populated with files)

shm         /dev/shm   tmpfs      nodev,nosuid,noexec   0 0

```

As far as the HAL goes, I have no idea what that is or why I cannot [still] use my drives.  I compiled the CMD64{options} into my kernel not as modules.

----------

## desultory

Well, there is HAL and there is HAL, I suspect the message was indicating a need for the latter.

If you could post the entire message, perhaps some context for the message, we might be able to figure out what is going on.

----------

## TheWhiteKnight

It is a little pop-up.  It says exactly what I posted.  I try to either mount or access the 2nd set of drives and I get that message.

----------

## desultory

So, you get a popup saying "feature only available with HAL" when you attempt to mount any of the drives on the IDE RAID interface using a GUI, correct? If so, which GUI? What happens when you attempt to mount the drives as a sufficiently authorized user from a terminal? What is the output of ls /sys/block?

----------

## TheWhiteKnight

My output is:

hda hdb hdc hdd sda

nothing for my hde+ drives.  

The drives show up when I open up "Storage Media" through my KDE, however when I enter fdisk through xterm as root login, I get "unable to open  /dev/hdg"

- Josh

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## desultory

About the only sensible thing I can suggest to try to fix this would be to do as the message indicates and emerge hal and keep watch for some magic.

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## TheWhiteKnight

 *desultory wrote:*   

> About the only sensible thing I can suggest to try to fix this would be to do as the message indicates and emerge hal and keep watch for some magic.

 

:: laughing ::  well I am emerging HAL as I type.  I am expecting my computer to start talking to me at any time after this.  If it happes, I am going to go back to OS/2 warp.... lol.

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## desultory

If it starts talking just be firm with it and refuse to let it drive.

----------

