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mfstools problems with odd setup question
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Posted by: knownzero

I want to do a backup using Tiger's tools, but the way my computer is set up, I think I'm hosed. Here's the problem: I have a mobo (Asus A7V) with 2 ata/100 connectors and 2 ide connectors. I have 3 hard drives set up on the primary ata/100 (using a Trios HD switch) and the primary master has my cd-rom and the secondary master has a cd-rw on it. The way the Trios switch is set up, the hard drives are all set up such that they all run off the primary ata/100 connector. I would want to boot from Hinsdales cd but I'd have to take out both cd's so that's a no go. Has anybody got any ideas for a workaround using the ata/100 connectors or had any success using them? I kind of think that it wouldn't work because the ata/100 uses drivers loaded at boot from teh BIOS to recoginze the hard drive and nothing is going to recogize that the drive is actually there (the drives don't show up in the BIOS or on the startup screens).
Any suggestions?

Posted by: gtrogue

I am a bit confused by the wording of your post because ATA100 connectors are IDE connectors. Are you saying you have 4 IDE connectors? Or 2 IDE connectors on the mobo and an ATA100 PCI adapter card?

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Philips DSR6000 DirecTiVo
Hughes GXCEB0T DirecTiVo
Philips HDR112 14 Hour POT- Plain Old TiVo

Posted by: 9thTee

Can you not just yank all of the drives out for a little and then just connect what you need to do the upgrade? Then when it is finished, put everything back the way it was?

Mark
9thTee.com

Posted by: knownzero

gtrogue: yes, the ata connectors are ide, but they are controlled like a scsi bus, with a special set of drivers on the mobo, they don't 'look' like ide connectors to dos or any of the boot disks (that I can figure out). The actual mobo has 4 'ide' connectors on it, 2 ata/100's and 2 regular ide's.
Asus mobo Picture The two connectors on the left are ata/100 and the right two are ide...

Tracer: The way the computer is set up, for whatever reason, the computer won't boot when I take the drives out of it's current configuration and try to put them on the regular ide's. I've tried it on two computers and it just doesn't want to recognize the drive (which is reallllly bizarre). Had all kinds of problems just getting the jumpers set up to work with each other and I'd have to tear it all down and redo it. Were talking 2 cdr's, 3 hard drives hooked to the Trios and a floppy all in an atx mid. it's a mess. it works but its a mess. I'm trying to avoid it at all costs due to the time involved.

[This message has been edited by knownzero (edited 09-02-2001).]

Posted by: Lightman

Just out of curiosity, where are the 4 connectors ? I only see two(both blue) on the link you provided below. But, you say there is four connectors? Am I just not seeing them, and if so where are they ?

[QUOTE]Originally posted by knownzero:
The actual mobo has 4 'ide' connectors on it, 2 ata/100's and 2 regular ide's.
Asus mobo Picture The two connectors on the left are ata/100 and the right two are ide...

Posted by: Merle Corey

quote:
Just out of curiosity, where are the 4 connectors ? I only see two(both blue) on the link you provided below. But, you say there is four connectors? Am I just not seeing them, and if so where are they?

It's a little hard to see in the picture, but just below each of those blue connectors is another black connector.

As for getting the TiVo drive attached, booting from CD, and backing it up... Why can't you just attach the TiVo drive as a slave to either the CD-R or the CD-RW? Or does the boot CD not recognize your ATA100 drives?

Theoretically speaking, you should be able to connect 8 IDE devices given 4 mobo connectors, and you've only got 5 devices active...

Posted by: dswallow

That motherboard simply has an on-board Promise Ultra/100 controller, and from your description, your current IDE drives are hanging off the Promise controller. The Linux kernel on the boot CD loads drivers from Promise controllers and they should be detected when you boot from the CD.

In your BIOS, just make sure you modify the boot setting so the CD-ROM drive is first in the boot order (probably only one of the CD-ROM drives will be bootable, so you might need to try each).

When the linux kernel has booted and you've logged on as "root", use Shift-PageUp and look at the whole record of loading the drivers and you should see a report of all the drives that were found. Those on the Promise controller will likely be \dev\hde through \dev\hdh.

The Trios HD switch (http://www.romtecusa.com) simply provides you a way of selecting one and only one of the drives you've connected to the Trios to be connected to the IDE controller the Trios is plugged into. The other two drives are not connected at the same time. There's no software specific to the Trios.

I think the main issue you'll have to deal with is that the only drive not byte swapped is the first drive on the primary IDE controller that would be \dev\hda. If you have a spare drive around, connect it and format it as FAT32 if it isn't already... unless there's some way with the boot CD to identify another drive not to be byte swapped (if so, then you probably can use a drive off the Promise controller).

However, from the info on Romtec's web site, it appears they're just recommending using the cable select jumper on certain brands of drives. If that's how yours are jumpered, you should be able to rejumper one of them as a master (or master w/slave connected, as appropriate), plug it into the regular primary IDE connector, ensure your BIOS is set to try to boot from the regular IDE devices, and boot.

I've moved drives between Promise controllers and the regular motherboard IDE controllers before; there's nothing special about them (unless you're using RAID striped or spanned volumes, but that isn't a feature of the Promise controller on that motherboard).

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Doug Swallow
doug@2150.com

[This message has been edited by dswallow (edited 09-04-2001).]

Posted by: Tiger

Actually there is no way to tell Linux to byte-swap all drive, or not byte-swap only one drive. It is a drive by drive basis, explicitly naming hdb, hdc and hdd. Therefore, hde and above are not byte-swapped. Of course, the CD may or may not have those device nodes.

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TMNBT Special Forces
Are we not men? We are TiVo!

Posted by: knownzero

Thanks for all the replies, I finally figured it out, the 'tbd' options was able to do the job and the drive letters weren't something I could figure out until I found a linux book and a command that worked (DF) and that told me where the right mount points/drive letters were.
Now, if I could just get qunlock to work....

Posted by: kazymyr

quote:
Originally posted by Tiger:
Actually there is no way to tell Linux to byte-swap all drive, or not byte-swap only one drive. It is a drive by drive basis, explicitly naming hdb, hdc and hdd. Therefore, hde and above are not byte-swapped. Of course, the CD may or may not have those device nodes.

It does have all the nodes up to hdh16; and the bswap parameters can be passed at boot time on the command line. Alternatively, one can use hdparm (which is on the CD) to tweak the bswap/dma mode on each drive.

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"Boy, what is your fascination with my forbidden closet of mystery?"
--C.C.W

Posted by: Tiger

Just a bit of warning, I can't garuntee restore will work if bswap and dma are set. I don't know if setting dma unsets bswap, but MFS Tools goes by what the kernel says about byte-swapping. If it says it is, and it really isn't, the backup will not work.

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TMNBT Special Forces
Are we not men? We are TiVo!

Posted by: kazymyr

quote:
Originally posted by Tiger:
I don't know if setting dma unsets bswap, but MFS Tools goes by what the kernel says about byte-swapping. If it says it is, and it really isn't, the backup will not work.

It does. If you boot with bswap, then go and set udma to 1, the bswap in /proc/ide/hdx/settings is turned to 0. I've experimented a bit while working on the CD. If that's how you test it, it's reliable.

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"Boy, what is your fascination with my forbidden closet of mystery?"
--C.C.W