fedora installation problems

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Kevin Owen <kjvowen at rochester.rr.com>

| I am trying to install Fedora 7 on a really old computer (It has an Abit 
| BP-6 motherboard).  It has 4 IDE channels run by 2 separate controllers, 
| one of which supports Ultra DMA/66, the other doesn't.  I have a DVD-ROM 
| drive and 3 hard drives, each on one of the channels.  It appears that 
| the Fedora 7 installer doesn't recognize the second controller (the one 
| with Ultra DMA/66), since neither of the hard drives on it appear in the 
| list of devices that can be partitioned.  The Fedora 6 installer, on the 
| other hand, sees both controllers fine.

I have one of those motherboards.  With dual Celeron 300A CPUs
overclocked to 459MHz!  But I haven't tried F7 on it.

The second controller (HighPoint HPT-366) was pretty
buggy/idiosyncratic.  The maintainer of the Linux Kernel IDE code had
access to a BP6 (I think) and used to try to keep the driver working.

It was important to have the right BIOS flashed.  Perhaps bp6.com is a
place to look.  But then again, your BIOS must be OK if it worked
satisfactorily for previous Linux systems.

The IDE maintainer said that CD drives were not supported on the second
controller.

Anyway, I decided that it was best not to use the second controller.

Unfortunately, as I understand it, the kernel IDE code was horrible
and has been replaced in f7 by libata.  (The IDE maintainer was
replaced long ago.)  It would not be surprising if libata does NOT
support the HPT 366 idiosyncrasies.

I think that I've heard that there is a way to use the old IDE driver
rather than the libata code, but I don't know what it is.

I would guess that a PCI IDE controller board should be easy and cheap to find.

You don't actually need to use both controllers to drive 4 devices.  I
admit that performance drops when you try to simultaneously use two
devices on one channel.

I hope that this speculation and guess-work helps you.  Please follow
up with anything else you learn.