On Monday 08 October 2001 10:51 am, Skip Gaede wrote:
I need help!
I upgraded my system to a new MLB and a faster CPU. With the new board, I can't read or write to my ZIP drive (under Linux). I have a SCSI system, with an Adaptec 78xx controller, an Adaptec RW CDROM (also ATAPI), and the ZIP drive.
Kernel: 2.4.10
More progress! The drive is best handled by the ide-floppy driver, and it works best when the BIOS is setup to present the drive as a mini-hard drive, as opposed to a big floppy. The driver, at least as far as formatting goes, stinks. doing a mke2fs -b 1024 -v /dev/hdc1 took a paltry 2 hours to complete, as compared with about 2 minutes for a complete format under WinNT. or 10 minutes using the Iomega software. During the two hour format, I got over 100 lost interrupts, which were interpreted as bad blocks. The driver is being worked on, and this one is at rev 0.97.sv. It uses packet writing technology. There are a number of settings I can tweak under /proc/ide/hdc/settings, but I've not found documentation on the params: name value min max mode ---- ----- --- --- ---- bios_cyl 96 0 1023 rw bios_head 64 0 255 rw bios_sect 32 0 63 rw breada_readahead 4 0 127 rw current_speed 8 0 69 rw file_readahead 0 0 2097151 rw ide_scsi 0 0 1 rw init_speed 8 0 69 rw io_32bit 1 0 3 rw keepsettings 0 0 1 rw max_kb_per_request 127 1 127 rw nice1 1 0 1 rw number 2 0 3 rw pio_mode write-only 0 255 w slow 0 0 1 rw unmaskirq 1 0 1 rw using_dma 0 0 1 rw Clearly the driver and the current settings leave something to be desired. I'm now investigating leaving the drive formatted vfat and creating a rescue disk using the loopback device to mount a couple of files on the drive. Does anyone know of any up-to-date references on making a loopback root filesystem under the 2.4 kernel? The most recent document I've found on Linuxdoc is by Andrew Bishop dated Sept 24, 1999. Thanks, Skip