UDMA66 and Setup

Adif, UDMA66 will work, however you will need to compile a new kernel for it.
Dennis

.which is what the URL i gave also says.

Yes, but I cannot get the drive to be detected DURING setup. Hence, I don't have a chance to patch the kernel because it is not yet compiled =(

Check the drive data to see if there is a jumper to permit UDMA 33. If so, like the Maxtor drives, then set to 33 and build the kernel. Or, put a UDMA 33 drive in and create the kernel and then switch to the UDMA 66.

dew: Doesnt matter, it will be a UDMA66 interface, with a UDMA33 drive attached. Wont work.

Someone also told me that if I replace plug in the ribbon to the IDE slot it would work. Yeah, if only it would fit.
I tried plugging in an IDE ribbon to the drive but it won't fit either. Why do they say it supports IDE if the format of the ribbon is totally different? =)

UDMA66 drives use a special 80 wire cable and connector.

It will NOT work even with the cable, the cable only enables the 66MB mode of the drives. The cable interlaces a ground line between every signal line. (the same way SCSI has done for 15-20 years already). It will NOT help you get a linux to recognize the controllers. But you MUST Have this cable to be able to USE the higher speed of a DMA66 drive, regardless of operating system.

And 66Mbyte/sec is nonsense, you will never see over 20Mbyte/sec since the drives arent faster in any event.

But as a side point, if you want to see real speed, get a Promise Fasttrak/66 IDE_RAID controller, plug in two IBM deskstar XGP's in a Raid-0 config, and THEN you have speed. Note tho that linux doesnt quite support this controller either, but suport is imminent according to Promise Tech. Not quite the speed of the striped U2W disks i use in my workstation.. but anyway)

If one pin is locked in the connector (as in blocked) this means that the cable assumes that the drive should support Cable Select for ID assignment.

and dew: A UDMA66 connector is still 40 pin, its only the cable that has 80 conductors.

J2, no offense meant, but Maxtor, IBM and Fujitsu are releasing their new drives with an 80 pin connector!

Also, the new Intel MB's with the OR840 chipset do enable better than 20MBPS!

I was referring to the MoBo side, i have yet to see 80 pin connectors there.

And as for the chipsets, all we need after the 840 is _drives_ that actually can pump data that fast.

get some benchmarks on a 10k rpm/U2W drive, they dont go much higher.

Not even two striped UDMA/66 drives can hit much higher then 17.5/22.5Mbyte/sec sustained transfer (burst transfer is pretty irrelevant for real world applications).

But since the UDMA/33 drives only did about 4-7.5Mbyte/sec sustained, sure it is a boost. To bad about the massive CPU toll required for an IDE Bus, and the lack of CTQ and such.

If you check out the newer Intel MB's, they have two sets of connectors. Standard IDE and the 80 pin connectors.

Which doesnt do a bit of difference in Adif's case. And as i said, the 66Mbyte/sec is a theoretical value, which we will never(?) see _sustained_ on a EIDE bus.

Okay please argue over this somewhere else such as IRC =)

Sorry :)

Fact remains, the URL i originally gave you, is pretty much all you can do, until UDMA66 is supported in 'stock' kernels.

Adif, give the info at this URL a look!

http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Ultra-DMA.html

Thanks you guys, but that document still says to plug in the IDE cable to the harddrive which doesn't fit. Read through it carefully. And also it tells me to hit ALT+F2 before the setup but there IS no virtual console probably because it is the DrakX setup. The only reason I downloaded Mandrake 7.0 BETA (Oxygen) is because of DrakX, the easy setup. If I quit DrakX it shows some shutting down of devices text and I press ALT+F2, got to the # prompt but I couldn't type anything.

Adif, as probably mentioned above somewhere, you will need a motherboard that accomodates the special UDMA66 drives and ribbon cable or a Promise Controller in order to cable this correctly.

Yes, I have my harddrive connected to the UDMA66 Slot on the motherboard with the UDMA66 cable. I tried many combinations of plugging in the IDE cable instead or switching slots but it just won't work.

from my original URL (and i quote)

Installing Linux to an UDMA/66 drive
A couple of guys asked me this question within the first 24 hours of the publication of this page, therefore I might as well make this point clearer: you can install Linux on a disk attached to the HPT366 controller directly, and all the information you need is on this page. Below I will try to provide some more detailed instructions, and hopefully that will guide you through the process smoothly.

Before you start, please first read through the last section, "Enabling HPT366 without UDMA/66 support", as this is how we are going to get Linux working together with HPT366 without going through the kernerl building process in the first place (otherwise this would create a deadlock and nobody will be going anywhere). Next, if you feel like getting more information, hit this link for descriptions on installing Linux with other UDMA controllers. You can see that the instructions are quite similar, and you may refer to the article for a second opinion should any ambiguity occur in this document.

Boot with the installation floppy or CD-ROM supplied with your Linux distribution. After you have passed the boot process (there should be a menu or something coming up at this point), press Alt-F2 to switch to a different virtual console.
There should be a command prompt waiting there. Type in the following instruction:
# cat /proc/pci
You should see lots of information appeared on the screen. Find something that looks like the sample output shown at the end of the previous section. You may use Shift-PgUp and Shift-PgDn to scroll the display.
Compute the magic numbers as instructed in the previous section.
Reboot. This time when you see the boot prompt, type:
boot: linux ide2=0x????,0x???? ide3=0x????,0x????
What you see and the exact command to type varies from distribution to distribution. Check your installation manual or online help to make sure you are giving the right command.
This time the kernel should recognize the HPT366 channels and all the disks attached to them. Install as usual.
At the end of installation you should be offered the option of making Linux directly bootable from the disk or make boot floppies. I recommend you should have bootable floppies lying around in case something goes wrong, but whatever you do, you should modify lilo.conf and add the following line to it:
append="ide2=... ide3=..."
Just like you typed in the boot command prompt. If you do not do it now, you will have to type it manually each and every time you boot, otherwise Linux will not load successfully. Thank George Gusciora for the reminder.


all the instructions you need is in that textfile.

j2, yes I have read through all of that. Please don't paste bulk information. If you read my previous comments carefully, I have mentioned that I cannot access the virtual console in the first place.

Adjusted points to 55

If you cannot reach the virtual console, you cannot follow the above info. If you cannot follow the above info, you cannot install to a UDMA66 drive, without some _serious_ trixing (which involves already having another linux system set up.)

I am afraid you will have to wait for:

1. The stock kernels to support UDMA66
2. Until you can try another distribution