[rescue] tape drive with no SCSI

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

Joshua D Boyd wrote:

> My drives and controller on my lintel station are UDMA.  All reasonably
> new stuff, no fancy hardware, default BIOS settings (except to make it
> boot CDROM then floppy, then HD, instead of the opposite order).  Stock
> debian installation.

Under Linux you use hdparm to manipulate drive and controller settings.  

Sounds like something isn't set up right.  

Plus some buggy drive controllers are downgraded to PIO3 or PIO4
automatically unless you force it to a better mode.  

I've done the tests IDE vs. SCSI.  On a recent x86 system there is 0.5%
CPU usage difference, that is it.  But you have to set up the IDE drives
properly.

Use "time hdparm -t" or whatever the test flag is.

Cordially

Patrick Giagnocavo
patrick at zill.net