[rescue] tape drive with no SCSI

[Gregory Leblanc]

On Wed, 2001-11-07 at 21:30, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 12:30:35AM -0500, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Hmm.  Seems I don't have an hdparm command installed.  I'll have to look 
> into this.  

apt-get install hdparm, or up2date hdparm.

> However, it also seems to me that this is something that should just work 
> out of the box.  It is a standard 440bx chipset on a tyan mobo.  There 

Yep, out of the box it should "just work".  No idea how complex that is,
but it must not be simple, because there are smart people who haven't
figured it out.

> aren't that many things that are more standard, especially since this mobo 
> doesn't have extras like built in SCSI, sound, or ethernet.  The BIOS 
> startup display  says that it is in UDMA mode (although I suppose the 
> kernal could be downgrading it after startup).

The Linux kernel doesn't use the BIOS to communicate with drives.  If it
did, things would suck a lot more than they do.  Linux is able to get
around some of the moronic x86 things by simply going around the BIOS,
and doing it closer to the right way.  So, the kernel isn't
'downgrading', nor is the BIOS misreporting.  They're just going about
it different ways.

> This sort of thing really hits my buttons about linux (and perhaps any 
> unixish OS I suppose).  I just want to sit down and work and play with new 
> things.  It is not my goal to learn how to tweak out OSs, nor is it my 
> goal to learn to admin networks (although it seems I'm doomed to continue 
> learning about each for the time being if I want to get tasks 
> accomplished).  Sigh.

That sucks.  I do believe that these things work much better with Linux
2.4 than they did with 2.2, but they're clearly not perfect yet.
	Greg