[Gllug] UDMA drives, promise controller card and the BIOS

[Peter John Cameron]

This isn't strictly a Linux question but is Linux related as I was hoping to
install a nice new bright and shiny IBM deskstar UDMA100 disk drive into my
'puter today for Linux and Suse 7.3, but I'm having some problems.

My PC is a Gateway 550, Phoenix BIOS 4.0 Release 6.0. There is a Promise
Ultra 66 controller card and two hard drives, both connected to the first
port of the promise card. The master drive is winbloze; the secondary drive
is Linux. I use LILO on the master drive as the boot controller.

Now, when I disconnect the secondary drive, the PC boots up, a message
saying that the Ultra 66 controller is scanning the IDE bus appears after
which another message appears saying that the Ultra 66 BIOS is not loaded,
and consequently the dreaded "Operating system not found" message.
Reconnecting the secondary drive and rebooting puts the PC back to normal.

I want to put my new Linux drive on the second port of the controller card,
as a master drive. Of course, I could keep the existing secondary drive, and
format it as a winbloze data partition, but I'd intended selling it to my
work :)

I don't know why the master drive appears to have some sort of dependency on
the secondary drive. Is it LILO-related?

Any idea what's going on?

Cheers,
Peter



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