SB16 PnP CD-ROM - proprietary or IDE?
I apologize for the consumption of bandwidth. I have queried the
distributor from whom I purchased Debian for support, but this particular
problem appears to be quite specific and I'm hoping someone on the list may
have already encountered it.
Here are two lines from the CD-ROM howto:
"If you recently bought a CD-ROM drive, don't assume that if it connects to
a SoundBlaster card it should use this [sbpcd] kernel driver. Most CD-ROM
drives being sold by Creative Labs are now EIDE/ATAPI drives."
"Some documentation may refer to proprietary interfaces as IDE, leading some
to mistakenly believe they are ATAPI drives."
So, the CD-ROM howto didn't clarify which I should be using for my
particular case. It's a SB16 PnP, with a 4x CD-ROM that plugs into the
soundcard. The manual refers to the drive as IDE.
I have installed the base linux kernel installed (from my DOS partition),
and can boot up without a hitch. I tried installing the sbpcd driver from
the bootstrap menu until my face turned blue, to no avail. I also tried
installing from CD with every IDE option, opening and closing the drive door
regularly for good measure.
Here's a scenario. I boot up DOS, along with the PnP drivers, so my
soundcard and CD-ROM work fine. Then I soft boot using my Linux boot disk.
During boot up, I observe these messages:
hdh: Matshita CR-581 ATAPI CD-ROM drive
ide3 at 0x168-0x16f, 0x36e on irq 10
These messages do *not* appear if I hard boot straight into Linux.
Once I sign on, I type the following commands and get the following output:
(the * indicates items appearing only when I soft boot into linux from DOS,
having already loaded my DOS drivers)
cat /proc/devices
Character devices
1 mem
2 pty
3 ttyp
4 ttyp
5 console
7 vcs
10 misc
12 tpqic02
36 netlink
Block devices
1 ramdisk
2 fd
3 ide0
7 loop
9 md
34 ide3 *
36 ed
cat /proc/filesystems
ext2
minix
msdos
nodev proc
iso9660
cat /proc/interrupts
0 timer
1 keyboard
2 cascade
8 + rtc
10 + ide3 *
13 math error
14 + ide0
cat /proc/ioports
0000-001f dma1
0020-003f pic1
0040-005f timer
0060-006f keyboard
0070-007f rtc
0080-008f dma page reg
00a0-00bf pic2
00c0-00df dma2
00f0-00ff npa
0168-016f ide3 *
01f0-01f7 ide0
036e-036e ide3 *
03c0-03df vga+
03f0-03f5 floppy
03f6-03f6 ide0
03f7-03f7 floppy DIR
>From a DOS application I use called ICU (interrupt configuration utility), I
can see my SB16 PnP is set up to use IRQ 5 and 10, DMA 1 and 5, I/O ports
108, 168-16f, 200-207, 220-22f, 330-331, 36e-36f, and 388-38b. I have tried
all these IO ports and more with sbpcd, both after a soft boot from DOS and
a hard boot straight into Linux.
Finally, the command ln -s /dev/hdh /dev/cdrom does not work. There is no
/dev/hdh, although linux finds hdh:Matshita CR-581 ATAPI CD-ROM drive during
start-up.
I have tried everything short of opening the case and playing with the
jumpers on the CD-ROM drive. That will be a last resort only - my hands are
too big to perform such tasks safely.
Jeff J
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