TiVo Community Forums Archives - Getting MFSTools CD to recognize 2nd IDE controller

TiVoCommunity.com
(c)opyright 1995-2005 All rights reserved
indexcheckTC
This area is a static history of posts in the TiVo Community Forum Archive.
This archive history was made for the simple indexing of search sites like Google.

Pages:1

Getting MFSTools CD to recognize 2nd IDE controller
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)

Posted by: gsr

Hoping to make swapping drives around in my system easier, I added a Promise Technology Ultra133 TX2 Ultra ATA/133 Controller to my PC recently. This gives me a total of 4 IDE controllers (the primary and secondary on the motherboard, and primary and secondard on the Promise card). When I boot my system with the MFS Tools 2.0 boot CD, Linux recognizes the controllers and drives on the motherboard (Intel D845EBG2), but reports an unknown controller (which I'm assuming is the Promise board) and doesn't report any drives connected to the Promise controller. Is there any (hopefully simple) way to add support for the Promise controller? This would make cable swaps much easier, as I wouldn't need to disconnect any of my standard drives when working on my Tivo drives.

Posted by: WeKnSmith

My guess is that if someone knew enough about Linux & MFS Tools they could add the driver for your card. Promise offers drivers on their site:

http://www.promise.com/support/down...ory=driver&os=4

The drivers are available for kernel 2.4.18 and 2.4.19. What version of linux is MFS Tools built on?

Posted by: Robert S

I'd be surprised if you could make the MFS Tools CD recognise it, but MFS Tools doesn't need the CD. I would think there's a good chance that a more recent version of Linux would have support for your controller.

Unless you create the links yourself you'll have to invoke the binary directly, which changes the command line slightly.

mfsbackup becomes ./mfstool backup

mfsrestore becomes ./mfstool restore

etc.

The only outstanding problem then is drive locking.

Posted by: BlankMan

Support for the Promise 133 chip is relatively recent in linux kernels. When I wanted to put an additional IDE controller in I had to settle for ATA/100 and I think that was in the 2.4.4 kernel.

My point being, someone would have to get the latest kernel that had support for the 133 chip, make a kernel with the chip gen'd in, then make a boot CD and get it to you. Or gen a module that you could then put on a floppy and once booted off the CD install the module.

If you know how to do it it's easy, but I don't know if there's incentive for the providers of the boot CD's to do it.

Once the booted kernel recognizes the controller the drives will probably come up as hde, hdf, hdg, and hdh. It be easy enough to link hda, b, c, or d to any one of these, or delete hda, b, c, or d and then use mknod to create them with the correct major and minor numbers. i.e. it would be called hdc but in reality point to a device that is other wise known as hde, or hdf, or hdg, etc. you get the idea. That way any utility that you can't tell it the specific drive and is only aware of a-d is fooled and thinks it's still dealing with a-d.

Posted by: gsr

Thanks for the responses so far. I'm not really a Linux person yet, so I'll just swap cables around for now. I am planning on making my system dual boot at some point (actually with removable drives), so I'll worry about support for the controller at that point.