LS120 problems
A few weeks ago, I got a new office computer (a P II) with an ATAPI LS120
installed. The kernel (2.0.34, Debian 2.0) had no trouble detecting it as
an ide-floppy, and I was able to mount it as type vfat with no problems.
Since a single LS120 is not much use, I next had one installed in my home
machine (a Pentium Pro, about 2 years old). With the same kernel version,
which has IDE floppy support compiled in, I cannot get it to work at all!
On bootup, the kernel reports that it is an "ATAPI unknown device, type
31", and, when I try to mount it, I am told that /dev/hdd is not a block
device.
Has anyone else encountered and solved a similar problem? I suspect that
either the drive itself or the BIOS is not correctly reporting this device
to the kernel. Is it the responsibility of the BIOS to do this? If so,
would a newer BIOS solve the problem?
Presumably I could get it to work if I could tell the kernel that /dev/hdd
is an LS120, perhaps using an append statement in lilo.conf. I looked at
the documentation for the IDE drivers in the 2.0.34 kernel and could not
find such a thing. You can tell the kernel that a device is a cdrom, but
not that it is an ide-floppy.
Before anyone asks, I don't have any version of Windows on either machine,
so I have no idea whether the LS120 at home works with another operating
system.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
James G. MacKinnon Department of Economics
phone: 613 545-2293 Queen's University
Fax: 613 545-2257 Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Email: jgm@qed.econ.queensu.ca K7L 3N6
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