[plug] IDE tape drive [solution]

[Michael Hunt]

On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 12:39, Matt Kemner wrote:

> Quoth Jon:
> 
> > > > So there were no other settings for the IDE connectors?
> 
> I went through the whole BIOS, and there was nothing else.
> I also upgraded to the latest BIOS and tried the latest stable Linux
> kernel (2.4.22)
> 
> I guess the only thing left to try is see what happens under Windows, but
> that's another several-hours job, and it would probably be cheaper to just
> buy another mainboard. :)

Disclaimer: Matt does not have an affiliation with any mainboard
manufacturer. ;-)

> Quoth Onno:
> 
> > > Back to my original question, do I tell the Kernel team so they can
> > > work-around it, or how do I tell Intel that their BIOS is broken - as
> > > both Matt and I suspect.
> 
> If it can be worked around, then it's probably a good idea to do so, but
> I'm not sure if a disabled IDE port can be worked around...

I'd say tell Intel and leave the ball in their court. From the sounds of
it you probably won't buy from them again unless they fix the problem in
a way that restores your faith in them. You have a workaround to the
problem at hand, but your not the manufacturer, cant even start to look
at modifying the BIOS (don't have the utils, code etc) so I say the
issue clearly lies with them.

As far as contacting the kernel team I would say that it is reasonable
for kernel hackers to expect that the hardware they are writing code for
_should_ behave sanely. In this situation it isn't and while they have
made changes to the kernel to work around certain manufacturers hardware
bugs (have a guess which one) I would suspect that they would give the
same advice.

Checking to see if this problem also occurs under Windows would be a big
boost to getting the problem resolved with Intel. It just opens up the
potential number of people who are effected if the problem is not
happening with just one OS.

> On Mon, 29 Sep 2003, quoth Michael Hunt:
> 
> > Does the tape drive have any firmware patches available for it ??? It
> > could be the tape drives firmware that is causing the problem.
> 
> I tried another tape drive, completely different make/model, same result.

I just thought I would mention it. Wasn't sure if it had been tried.
Quite conclusively rules out firmware from the tape drive being an
issue.

>  - Matt

Michael Hunt


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