Re: LiveCD Problems

[Garance A Drosihn <drosih@xxxxxxx>]

At 4:41 PM -0500 7/4/04, Shawn wrote:
> On Sat, 3 Jul 2004 10:36:03 -0700 (PDT), Matthew Dillon
> <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >  :1) dmesg | less shows that DF thinks I don't have an ATA-66 cable or
> >  : something of the like on my first IDE interface where my (only) hard
>  > : drive is connected, I do have an ATA-133 rated cable, and the hard
>  > : drive is an ATA-100 device.
>  >
> >      One thing to note here... there's a good chance that you don't
> >      actually have an ATA-133 rated cable.  There are a ton of cables
> >      being sold that look like they ought to be ATA-133 (e.g. they have
> >      the double density wires), but in fact are not.  I had a similar
> >      scratch-the-head situation and replacing the cable fixed the
> >      problem.
>
> Well, I don't believe this, but I pulled out an ole' crufty looking
> double density wire IDE cable from my closet swapped out the one
> that came with my motherboard (Gigabyte) and rebooted, and now
> suddenly dfly does UDMA100. What I don't understand is why both
> the Linux Kernel and Windows XP ran the HD with the other cable at
> UDMA100 without any problem.

Fwiw, I once had a system setup with multiple-OS's, and had a
similar problem where FreeBSD wouldn't recognize a drive as ATA/100
while some other OS's seemed to be happy (*).  Years went by without
me figuring it out.  Finally it was time to ugprade, and while moving
hard-disks to a new machine I noticed that the IDE cable had been put
in backwards.  The end that was supposed to plug into the drive was
plugged into the motherboard, and (obviously) visa-versa.  I switched
the cable around so that it was connected correctly, booted up, and
FreeBSD was happy with it.  So then I shutdown the PC again and moved
the hard drive to the new PC.  I managed to figure it out on the
very day that "it just didn't matter anymore"...

(* - I know that the other OS's *reported* an ATA/100 connection, but
I never checked to if they were really using the drive at that speed.
Also, this was long enough ago that it might have been ATA/66 and not
ATA/100, but the basic idea is the same).

--
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@xxxxxxxxxxx
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@xxxxxxx