Re: Install problem on Supermicro X6DHT-G system
On Tuesday 03 Jan 2006 14:26, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 02:08:49PM +0000, Paul Brook wrote:
> > On Monday 02 January 2006 21:56, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> > > On Mon, Jan 02, 2006 at 04:51:32PM -0500, Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
> > > > Debian Installers. My BIOS reports
> > > >
> > > > IDE Channel 0 Master 250GB SATA1
> > > > IDE Channel 1 Slave CD-ROM
> > >
> > > That is probably the whole problem. The SATA should NOT be treated as
> > > an ide device unless you are trying to install something obsolete like
> > > windows XP which doesn't do SATA natively.
> >
> > More importantly you've got a slave device with no master on the same
> > channel. That's not supposed to work, and asking for all sorts of strange
> > problems.
>
> Oh right. I forgot to mention that too. Always a very good point. You
> can't have a slave if there is no master. It just doesn't make sense.
>
> Len Sorensen
CD-ROM drives usually used to be factory-set to "slave" so that a clueless
n00b would be unlikely to do any harm by attaching it straight to the
existing HDD cable {the HDD is invariably set to master}. However, DVD+RW
writers {which need a high throughput if you don't want many expensive
laser-decorated beer mats} are commonly factory-set to "master" and supplied
with a new cable.
Most operating systems, and most motherboards, really don't care about this;
the drives are not really "master and slave" in the sense that communications
meant for the "slave" are not relayed through the "master". These were just
convenient designations that seem to have stuck.
MS-DOS *does* care about this, though Windows 95/98/ME could access CD-ROM
devices natively without going through DOS. So it was posible for a really
misconfigured Win9X machine to have some applications {true 32-bit ones}
seeing the CD drive and other applications {16-bit ones} not seeing it.
80386 Linux will install onto, and boot from, hdb quite happily with no hda
present {I've done it by mistake myself once}. And it doesn't care if the
CD-ROM device is hdd with no hdc.
However, I *have* encountered *one* motherboard which *did* complain about
slave IDE devices with no master present. That was an ASRock board with some
kind of AMD 32-bit CPU. Whether this is still done on 64-bit motherboards, I
do not know.
--
AJS
delta echo bravo six four at earthshod dot co dot uk
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