Hard drive in primary channel showing in secondary channel
 

Hi, I have an 80GB Maxtor drive set as master in the primary channel, but in Mandrake 9.1 Control Center it shows in the secondary channel. My setup is:

Onboard VIA VT8367 Primary master: Maxtor 6Y080PO (hde)
Onboard VIA VT8367 Primary slave: free
Onboard VIA VT8367 Secondary master: Asus S520/A CD Drive (hdg)
Onboard VIA VT8367 Secondary slave: free

CMD-0649 IDE Controller Primary master: WD400BB-75CLB0 (hda)
CMD-0649 IDE Controller Primary slave: free
CMD-0649 IDE Controller Secondary master: ‎LITE-ON LTR-16102B (scd0
CMD-0649 IDE Controller Secondary slave: free

I have Windows Me, Windows 2000 and Mandrake 9.1 installed in the Maxtor drive. Win Me runs OK, all drives at full DMA modes and in their respective channles, but the drive acts funny under Windows 2000 and Mandrake 9.1. In Windows 2000, it shows in the Secondary channel and sets to PIO mode although the "Use DMA if available" option is set. And in Mandrake, it shows in the secondary channel (in UDMA 5 mode). Before installing Mandrake I had never had this problem so, can this have some connection with LILO? It's installed in the MBR. Kernel version is 2.4.21-0.13.

Thanks

//Moderator's Note:
Moving to Linux - Hardware

OK, linux identifying a drive on the wrong channel is just plain weird...
Is it detecting both controllers? Are you using a stock kernel?

As for the PIO weirdness in Win2k, it's a known problem. good old Windoze assumes that once a drive burps a couple times (or Windows thinks it does) it's never able to handle DMA, ever again. There's no way to tell it otherwise, only fix is to uninstall the drive and the IDE channel from your system in Device Manager, and then reboot into win2k and let stupid, stupid windows re-detect it and go "oh, look! that brand new drive has DMA!"

Long term solution: format the windows partition and reformat it ext3.

--Rounan

I have found that jumpers are not fool proof, and systems with clever bios can let bad configs run close to normal! You may want to force the drive to Master and not cable select and force the slave to Slave and not cable select. Note also that the device furthest from the controller is the master, make sure this is the case. Also check the BIOS to see what it says bout what is connected where.

As for the PIO and DMA issue you can force these settings using hdparm. For fun test the drive speed 1st with hdparm and then force the settings.

hdparm -Tt /dev/hd[a-z]

read the man page and help for hdparm, but here is what I have in rc.local

/usr/sbin/hdparm -c 1 -d 1 -p 4 /dev/hdc