Re: Maxtor IDE controller cards not working

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 07:22:14PM -0500, Greg wrote:
> Good catch, but the mistake was in the email.  I did type MAKEDEV hdo and
> MAKEDEV hdm on my pc and still no joy .. I really *wish* I had just typed a
> typo ...
> 
> I *think* that linux has a limit of 255 devices and perhaps I have reached
> my limit.  I will try deleting some of them and see.

No, don't do that! There is no such limit (/dev is basically just an
ordinary directory full of device nodes - there's nothing particularly
magic in the kernel for it, unless you're using something like devfs or
udev, which still doesn't have such a limit), and it'll be a pain
restoring the device nodes you've deleted.

This isn't a kernel problem at all. You just need to upgrade makedev so
that it knows how to create that device node properly; the version in
woody doesn't. Alternatively, do it by hand (laborious, but should
work):

  mknod -m 0660 /dev/hdm b 88 0
  chown root:disk /dev/hdm
  for x in `seq 1 20`; do
    mknod -m 0660 /dev/hdm"$x" b 88 "$x"
    chown root:disk /dev/hdm"$x"
  done

Likewise for hdo, but substitute 89 for 88.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]