[plug] IDE-TAPE

[Richard Meyer]

----- Forwarded by Richard Meyer/Australia/Contr/IBM on 02/09/2003 07:44 AM
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                      "Paul Arch"                                                                                                   
                      <paul at sdmgroup.co        To:       <plug at plug.linux.org.au>                                                   
                      m.au>                    cc:                                                                                  
                                               Subject:  Re: [plug] IDE-TAPE                                                        
                      01/09/2003 07:51                                                                                              
                      PM                                                                                                            
                      Please respond to                                                                                             
                      plug                                                                                                          
                                                                                                                                    
                                                                                                                                    






>> This may sound silly but when you detect ide devices in the bios it can
>> give you the option of skipping the entry therefore leaving it blank if
it
>> was blank before.

>My understanding was linux accesses ide devices directly (hdds) without
>using the bios ? Is this the same for cd drives and tape drives? My
>experience is that if I have a hard disk disabled in the bios, linux will
>still find it.

I agree with this. I had my DVD drive set as secondary slave, and installed
a CD writer as sec master. The result was that when I wanted to install a
new distro, I couldn't boot from the DVD drive, only the CD Writer. A quick
visit to the BIOS and a delete of sec master, and I could boot from sec
slave and once Linux was up, I could see and access sec master as normal.

I got the idea for this trick from when I reinstalled Win on a dual boot
machine - C: on /dev/hda1, drive D: on /dev/hdb1. Windows whined bigtime
after the second or third or fourth ... reboot that it wanted the CD in
drive D: and that was it. The only thing I did then was remove /dev/hdb
from the BIOS, and Windows installed fine. I then booted up Linux from a
rescue disk to reinstall lilo's boot record, and I only noticed later that
I hadn't re-enabled /dev/hdb in BIOS when Win couldn't find drive D:, in
spite of the fact that the / directory was on hdb.

RichardM